Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

A weekend of unwinding is behind us, so The Register returns to work on Monday with a fresh installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that reveals how you got in a tangle, and then extricated yourself.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Carter" who shared a story from the latter half of the 1990s when he worked at a telemarketing company. "It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs," he told The Register. It was also a time before the telemarketer's IT department employed specialists. Carter and his two colleagues – boss Mike and part-time student Stefan – therefore handled tasks ranging from programming to support, and everything in between.

The trio's server room housed a colorful collection of machines scattered across shelves and shoved under desks. If a computer needed work, the team used KVM switches to connect. "We considered this very modern at that time," Carter wrote.

One of the machines was reserved for testing, training, and relaxation. And one day that box started crashing and rebooting at all sorts of strange times. None of the team had made any changes that could have made the box unstable, so Carter checked its log files.

"They showed nothing out of the ordinary," Carter told The Register. "No temperature spikes, no failing drives, no network or device errors."

Stumped, the team called their server vendor of choice, who spent a weekend diagnosing the machine and found nothing wrong. But as soon as Carter placed the machine back in the server room, the problems resumed. Cue a new round of investigation, starting with each member of the team observing the other using the server in case someone entered a strange command. Next, a check of all cables. Then testing the monitor, in case it was the culprit. None of that probing yielded useful evidence, so the team decided to go home for the night.

Stefan was the last to leave. As he stood up, the server crashed again. "It turned out that Stefan had such an acrobatic way of unfolding his limbs when standing up that his knee pressed the server's reset button," Carter explained. "That was not an easy feat because the server was a meter to the left of his chair. But somehow he did that almost every time when sitting in that chair."

Carter and his colleagues quickly realized that an explanation along the lines of "our resident gangly youth kept turning off the server with his unfeasibly long limbs and clumsiness" would not go down well with their bosses. So they just said "we fixed it" and never spoke of the matter again.

What's the weirdest way you've caused crashes? Don't be shy! Click here to send us an email so we can share your story in a future edition of Who, Me? ®

No more fake tech news! theregister.com/who-me/)

8 COMMENTS

TIP US OFF Send us news