I had a very tense few hours with a customer’s server yesterday. The fact that it’s a Small Business Server and thus, the “Everything Server”, didn’t make things much better. I did two things, and both turned out to be bad. I also didn’t reboot between the two things, which also turned bad to be even worse.
One. I installed the new service pack, which is a Good Thing (generally), except when the computer hangs at “setting up, stage 3 of 3, 0% ready” and spins the little circle thingy for half an hour. At that stage the “please do not turn off your computer” becomes stressful to ignore. So i leaned on the power button, chose to restart in Safe mode and everything seemed okay. For a while.
Two. I changed the network adapter to traffic at 1 Gb/s full duplex. This turned out to be catastrophic. And i fully blame HP for this. After a reboot into normal mode, i had no network. At all. And i was not able to open the HP network interface control panel thingy, since the “management database” was locked. Not even netsh would help me this time.
After much stressful head scratching and beard tearing, i hypothesized that HP NIC management is grumpy because it was in fact plugged into a switch that only goes to 100 Mb/s. Yeah, i can appreciate that it can’t traffic with the wrong line speeds but that i can’t turn that setting off is criminal. If that indeed was the case. So i plugged the server’s NIC into a backline giga-Ether switch (yeah, you shouldn’t do that either) and rebooted. And hey presto, the “management database” was no longer locked.
Back to 100/full, plug the server where it belonged, and normality is restored. Just in time to go and fetch the kids. Sysadmin feat in true Hollywood style.
I just wonder what those HP engineers were thinking about.
