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Chris called me up in somewhat of a panic down in sunny Canary Wharf, he had a problem. He had opted for some easy weekend work, he had to perform some system updates to the production VMWare farm on their servers, everything was going to plan.  He had failed over the virtual machines to the other servers and was applying the individual configurations and system updates to the server before rebooting.

The following is a transcript of the call he made, I have removed references to the vendor to avoid any conflicts of interest or emotional outbursts.

Thankyou for calling Vendor8, your call is important to us, this is Janet speaking, how can I help you.

My server is broken, I have rebooted it, it’s on the bios screen saying the controller has detected changes, do I wish to accept these changes or reject them. I cannot loose this server or the data on it, can we call out an engineer or tell me which option to press?

Sure sir, we’ll get there, not a problem, can I have your name please, your company name and address, your system serial number, system, array and lights out firmware, the operating system, the exact error code.

Chris Surname
Large Corporate in Canary Wharf with nice sunny office and trees/plants inside
System serial number is 999999999 and model is 494940
Firmware 1.2, 4.3 and 1.11
POST Error 2781 detected please press enter to accept changes or escape to reject

We have had this before and ended up calling an engineer as when one of the guys did it, the server died.

Not a problem sir, your call number 1082319 has been actioned. Now the screen you’ve got, at what point of the POST start up is it, and what happened.

The call goes on, Janet was following protocol and industry standard best practice. The result. Janet suggested an array firmware upgrade to 4.32 as this fixed a known problem and will prevent further issues.

The final result, Chris thanks Janet and says he will absolutely do that and call them back. He then calls me vendor8 are rubbish, I hate their servers, so my server says error 2781 detected or some nonsense, what do I press enter or escape?

In what context I ask, what you been doing to what? So he discusses his previous actions and the server that is reporting the issue, I deploy google and before you know it, find a blog post quoting his exact error and issue saying ‘just press enter’ it’ll boot fine oh and when you’ve got a moment check out firmware version 4.32 which will stop it doing it again.

You see it’s not that support were not doing as they were supposed to, they were fulfilling their obligations in line with their business processes and preventing unnecessary engineer call outs, however Chris was in a situation of liability damage, he wanted a binary answer not to permanently fix the issue, he just wanted to know how to get his server to boot. You see his change window was for three hours, and he was completing one more reboot before handing everything back and putting everything back as it was. Significant deviation from that plan would require additional sign off and crucially management intervention. Therefore returning everything to service was the priority, a permanent fix was not deemed in scope, he could arrange time at another date to fix the issue properly.

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