Well as my nickname states I pride myself on being creative, especially in times of pressure. This morning i got to prove it once again on a SharePoint Farm for a small non-profit firm.
Let me set the scene, SharePoint WSS Farm 2007, running on some classic Compaq Servers. Yep I said Compaq. Running…..ready for this…2 gb of ram, with a whopping 18gb of storage. Back in its day this rig cost $18,000.00, now good luck finding parts.
It decided to go down at 9am, 1 hour after the doors opened. As I like to offer my services to a lot of non-profits that cannot afford IT, or even new/used equipment the first person who got the call was me of course after the in-house techie….”Chippie” got his fingers in and could not solve it.
So I drive down, and the servers are running except the DB server…nothing, no power, no signs of life. Crack open the case, and clean out the 4 lb. dust bunny. Did I forget to mention they have the server room in an old closet, semi-renovated 1895 house. Well after digging around and doing all the usual Hardware Support tasks we find that a detent clip holding one of the power connections has decided to die after 18+ years of abuse.
Creative thinking and well I ended at back performing a Paperclip repair with some superglue. You got it right I fell back on an Old MacGyver trick. Back up and running, for less then 1 cent. All Hail Digital MacGyver, miracle worker with a bag full of junk.
So for everyone looking to buy the next $10,000 server, or new fangled gadget, just keep in mind when it dies, how are you going to fix it.