The ringing phone interrupted Nalo's concentration, his eyes glued to the
terminal window, his fingers tapping at the keyboard. He glanced at the
caller-ID. Minicorp. Crap, not again. He paused his nethack game with a
control-z.
May as well just answer, Nalo thought.
"Nalo here."
"Nalo, Jim Terwilliger from Minicorp. We've got an emergency that server
you installed lost all of my files again. No one can get to their files."
Great, another emergency. "Did the routers get switched out again, Jim?"
Nalo was careful not to point out that it was Jim himself who had switched
out the routers and caused the last cluster-fuck. Nalo still had not figured
out why, but he was not thrilled to have made the hour-long ride from his
home office to fix that one.
"BRIAN did no such thing, I think we have a virus, or something."
Nalo rolled his eyes. "OK, which server are we talking about?"
"The one I use in my office. I don't know which one that is."
"Alright, I'll call Brian and we'll try to figure out what happened."
"Sounds good, let me know as soon as you can, I need my power-point for the
Quickcorp meeting in an hour, so this is really urgent."
Idiot. "No problem," Nalo said. He hung up and hit the newly-programmed
speed-dial for Brian.
Brian comprised the entire IT helpdesk at Minicorp, having started just
three weeks ago and most likely regretting it. He had already complained to
Nalo about the massive number of infected PCs. He knew nothing about Linux,
and Nalo wasn't sure whether he should be happy about that.
Brian answered his cell right away. "Hello?"
"Hey Brian, it's Nalo. You know anything about one of the file servers being
down? Jim is in full-blown panic mode."
"I know", Brian said. "He asked me to call you, then said he would do it
himself and ran off. The sales department server was not even running when I
checked it. I turned it on a few minutes ago, but no one can access their
files yet."
Nalo shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead, his jaw clenched. He steadied
his voice. "The server was powered OFF?"
"Yeah," Brian said.
Shit, this might take a while. Nalo pressed the speaker button and put the
handset down. "Can you get a keyboard and monitor plugged into that thing
and tell me what it says on the screen?" Nalo deliberately installed servers
like this headless, preferring a serial console and a laptop to a keyboard
and monitor, while his smaller clients appreciated the savings of a few
hundred dollars.
"One minute, I'll go grab them from my desk", Brian said.
Nalo had installed two identical file servers in neighboring office suites
several months ago. After the first panicked call from Jim, a result of an
employee unplugging a random network cable, Nalo had made the case for a
locked server closet and several switches. Jim had ignored his pleas. As a
result, one server sat on the floor in one of the suites, next to the
receptionist's desk. A router and cable modem balanced atop it, pulled aloft
by network cables that snaked up through a crooked ceiling tile. The second
sat wedged in a tiny back office, again with multiple cables arching up into
the plenum.
Brian was back on the phone. "The screen is full of wierd errors,
D...E...V...S...R...0...."
Nalo interrupted Brian, already having an idea of what was wrong, but not
quite believing it. "Is there a CD in the drive?"
Nalo heard the sliding sound of a CD tray.
"Yes," Brian said. "Hold on...it says 'Unlimited Power, Anthony
Robbins'...oh, crap"
Damnit, have to disable boot-from-CD next time I'm onsite. "So let's take
that out of the drive, then reboot. Let me know when it's back up," Nalo
said.
He punched the mute button on his desk phone as Brian began to rattle-off
screen messages. He popped a few Fritos in his mouth, then leaned back in
his chair, brushing the crumbs from his T-shirt. "I See Dumb People," it
said in large, white text. Nalo tried to envision one of the office workers
sticking the CD in the server, and being frustrated when nothing
happened. He tapped his fingers on his desk and sighed.
"OK, it looks like it's back up," Brian said.
Nalo tried to login into the server. Timeout. Nalo hit the mute button
again. "I still can't SSH in, must be something wrong with the networking,
or maybe the wiring. Can you double-check that the server's network cable is
plugged into the router?"
Nalo heard the sound of sliding metal-on-rug and some grunting.
"Yep, goes right into the router," Brian said after a minute.
"OK, go back to the terminal. You see a login screen, right?"
"Yeah."
"Good, the username is 'root', type that now."
Nalo heard the slow clicking of the keys.
"r...o...o...t...e. Now what?" Brian said.
Mother of God. "No 'e' on that. Just 'root'. Press enter afterward."
Nalo gave Brian the password, and managed to get him to a shell prompt after
a few missed tries. "Let's check network connectivity," Nalo said. "You've
used the ping command before?"
"Yeah," Brian said.
"Good. Type 'ping 192.168.2.1', then hit enter."
More typing. "It says 'command not found'."
"There is a space between 'ping' and the IP address, try it again," Nalo
said, an edge to his voice.
"Oh, I've got it now. 64 bytes from...."
"Now just hit control-c and type 'ping yahoo.com'. We'll see if DNS
resolution is working."
"Yeah, looks like that worked, too," Brian said.
Nalo tried again to login to the server. No luck. "Brian, is there any
chance someone replaced this router again?"
Silence. Then, after a long pause, "Oh, maybe, uh yeah I think so. I think I
know where the old one is."
Nalo wondered at what point during this conversation that might have been an
important piece of information. "Never mind that, can you connect to this
router's web admin screen for me?"
"Yeah, let me grab my laptop, be right back."
When Brian returned, Nalo talked him through allowing remote access to the
router, then he logged himself in and set up set up his access to the
server. A quick test and he was in. "I'm set, thanks for the help,
Brian. Maybe you should put some big, orange stickers on the networking
equipment saying 'Do Not Touch'."
"Hah, yeah, maybe I should." Brian sounded only partially amused. "Um, what
do I do with the keyboard and monitor? Can I unplug them? Will that hurt the
server?"
"Sure unplug them, but first, you have to logout from the console. Just type
'exit' at the prompt," Nalo said.
"But I can't, it still says '64 bytes from yahoo.com' over and over."
Nalo sighed, forgetting to hit the mute button this time. At least Brian
couldn't see his face.
