Reports of the floppy’s death are greatly exaggerated …
Does this message strike fear into your heart?
Normally this sends our team into crash-cart mode as we assume the worst – hard drive failure on the boot drive. Not a Good Thing on a Friday morning. Imagine our surprise and disgust when the culprit was found to be unexpected media in the server’s floppy drive.
The natural inclination of our security guy was to run to the DVR to find out who the perp was, but the real bottom line was the downtime. The box, a non-production server which had been rebooted during routine patching activity, was offline for 7 hours and 10 minutes. Had this been a production server, the monthly SLA would have been shot and someone on the data center team would have had some ‘splainin to do.
It might be a good time to review good floppy and USB drive hygiene with your troops. We wouldn’t want anyone to get shot!
We often see this pie chart showing the causes of system (not data center) downtime. The colors of the charts change, but the percentages are basically always the same:
One of the slices is always “human error”, but we never get a break down of how those errors cash out in terms of preventable vs. non-preventable (or “dumb” and “not-so-dumb,”, if you like) things that people did. Surely there’s got to be a Great Many Things in there – oh, say like….floppies left in a disk drive – that we can work on to drive that 32% number down.
So for starters, proper floppy and USB drive hygience is clearly on our list. I’ll explore some more of these human factors with you soon.
//spk
