On Call The instructions on what to do at 5:00PM Friday are clear: down tools and prepare to have fun for two days. But as many Register readers are required to remain available to fix things all weekend, our team is commanded to use Fridays for a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that describes dodging danger and disasters while performing tech support tasks.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regmomize as "Nina" who told us about the time she and her boss convinced one of their top clients - a local government authority - to create a maintenance window in its datacenter.

"The hot aisle looked like an absolute rat's nest," Nina told On Call. She got the job of untangling the mess and implementing proper structured cabling, while her boss took advantage of the downtime to maintain software on the authority's server fleet.

Fixing the servers required them to be online, so Nina and her boss constantly checked in to ensure she wasn't unplugging a critical cable.

The job progressed well and reached the critical moment at which the council's WAN would be disconnected.

Such was the importance of that WAN that Nina's boss came into the hot aisle and did the deed.

Which was what the job required - but also a problem. Because neither Nina nor the boss noted which port the WAN cable had been connected to.

This was OK … for the duration of the planned outage. But the council very much needed to be online once the job was done.

Nina and her boss weren't entirely certain how to do that!

Nina found a clue: a small piece of tape above one port had the word "WAN" written on it! Her memory of the cable didn't include that sticker, but she and her boss assumed the presence of the sticker meant it was the right port.

Bad assumption. Connecting the WAN cable to the port did not bring the org back online.

And the maintenance window was closing.

Nina searched her memory and felt sure the appropriate port was third from the left.

Her boss demurred. He spent a seeming eternity probing the router's interface searching for configuration data, and concluded that the port marked WAN was indeed not used for a wide area connection.

He then decided that port marked WAN should be used for the WAN and set about reprogramming the router to make it so.

Nina pointed out that was a very odd thing to do under pressure - shouldn't they just plug the cable into each port in turn until something worked? That approach might be little more than guesswork, but results could be swift.

The boss forbade any such plugfest, and spent yet more time trying to remember telnet syntax in search of a solution.

Nina decided to just go for it. She plugged the cable into the port she remembered - and by doing so restored the WAN connection within seconds.

"I immediately, and smugly, informed him that I had fixed the network by doing exactly what he told me not to."

The boss was "not happy about my smugness, but extremely grateful that I'd saved the relationship with that client."

"Ever since that experience, the boss developed a newfound respect for my attention to detail," Nina smugly told The Register. She signed off with advice to "Always check the little things you take for granted first, because it will either save a lot of time or be a bigger thing!"

Has a tech support job left you feeling justifiably smug? Share your smirk by clicking here to send On Call an email so you can one day bask in the feeling of seeing your story appear on a future Friday. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/02/on_call/