The One About That File Server

by Sydney Greenstreet

This story has been around for so many years that it's probably been cast as having referred to every file storage system ever sold.

The version that I was told attributed the event to a Novell arrangement.  For me, it's inspired observations on everything from pre-Windows hardware resilience, to support incident unpredictability, to the ever-present lack of documentation that all will experience during one's next emergency/screw-up/everyday work event.

Tech support gets a phone call.

A user at a remote but nearby location can't get to their files (the ones stored remotely, not locally).  Lots of things have already been tried: right-clicking rather than double-clicking at the icon in order to "run," several reboots, running any A/V, and so on.  The user even looked at Task Manager to try to spot oddball processes or usage.

Still, the normal result of the file window opening at the icon click and then showing folder icons wasn't happening.  What resulted was a blank window with no files - and the user hadn't deleted anything.  And no disk space info propagated at the window edge, either.

The support person then makes a house call to the user's location and sees the same set of results.

Then it occurs to support that the location of the file server that this user stores work on is... uncertain.  Not the path understood by software - the physical location of the box.

Fortunately, a few other users stop by the cubicle and report the same issue that the first user gets.  Those users don't know where the file server is, either.  The admin who set everything up had retired two years earlier.

The support person's next hunch fails to help.  A trip to the retired admin's networking room reveals all hardware up and running with all storage schemes responding properly to tests or at least pings.

Notes are located that list the specific server holding the files of all the complaining users.  The address looks good, but the box is nowhere to be found in the networking area.  Whatever system was in use, it involved a wire going out the back of the user's workstation (RJ45, coax, token ring... whatever it was, the version of the story that I got wasn't specific) to the location of the server or its hub if applicable.

The support hero produces a flashlight and follows the wire from the user's desk behind several other desks across the office, tracking the progress of the wire (fastened to the baseboard) only to see it disappear into a hole drilled into the wainscoting.

Support asks the office workers what's on the other side of the wall.  They don't know.  Some exploration with a tape measure leads around the corner and a closet is located in the opposite hall with a promising A/C vent in the door (looks like a server closet!) but nobody has a key to the lock and the key ring of the previous admin has no key that works.  The building superintendent's keys don't fit either and a call goes out for a locksmith.

Hours later, the lock is picked, the door swings open, and out comes a cloud of dust, choking everybody.

There's the file server!  But the monitor has long since burned out and dust has to be wiped off just to see any switch position labels on the server case.

Support goes looking for another monitor while the janitorial people bring up a vacuum cleaner.  When the new monitor is hooked up, an error message appears, referring to a well-known repair utility.  The utility is located on a 5-1/4 inch floppy in the networking room with "Novell" on the label.

The floppy drive is vacuumed out for good measure, the utility is run for about ten minutes, a reboot ensues, and all files are available again for all users.

This story is useful to me in pointing out all kinds of aspects of technology then and now; the reliability of UNIX-type systems; the wish that the old guy was still around to provide some arcane answer; the near-anarchy of the next service issue to hit the screen, phone, or chat system...  Do you really want to do this for a living?  Sure you do.

You'll see a lot of poorly tested, misconfigured, and oversold crap, but you also might see a system that's worked so well for so long that no user, admin, diagram, or supervisor can remember its location.