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Friday, February 16, 2007

Where's that Keyboard?

This is NOT a good reason for server downtime!

You might think that your network administrator might know enough to have all systems plugged into KVMs or at least ensure they have a BIOS that can be configured to ignore keyboard errors. It becomes troublesome when the responsibility is shifted to the people at the off-site datacentre, but that may have been the case. Frankly, that's the risk of allowing the employees of the datacentre touch your equipment, they don't have the same level of ownership that your own staff do.

Either way, a friend of mine expressed great frustration when a high-priority server rebooted due to a fault and didn't come back because someone had left it detatched from it's keyboard.

2 comments:

Brent Ashley said...

Looks like the same error I used to get on my Compaq Deskpros - there's a dipswitch on the motherboard for those machines, maybe for this one too...

Cameron Stevens said...

UPDATE: The box is running Windows NT, the problem was caused by installing software that was not compatible with Windows NT 4.0. The software installed a device that, when the system booted, would report an error and it would wait for input. The input was required before any remote control software was active.

The problem was resolved by removing the device, but this was done after a long "discussion" on the requirement of developers being "hands-off" from the production environment.

The software was originally installed outside of protocol and without proper testing. The software itself was incompatible with Windows NT 4.0 and this was "known" prior to use. Oops.