Business details
Registered company no. 11869849
VAT number 317720513
There used to be a huge temptation to go to site and get hands on with things. A friend of mine seemed to particularly like to do this rather than use the management capabilities of the devices, at least that’s how I remember it.
In this particular instance he decided to go to site for whatever reason, possibly to coordinate better with the highly non-technical fault reporter whilst looking at our solution from end to end at the same time. Often a very valid way to fault find, albeit time consuming, costly and a bit annoying.
On return he looks a bit grumpy and tells me how on inserting a console cable into the onsite device, it rebooted, taking the whole office down for a few minutes. Then it was fine, right up until he removed the console cable and it rebooted again.
This sort of thing you just can’t make up. It took a long time in the office with one of the devices to work out it was a specific combination of USB to serial adapter, laptop, cable and software version to guarantee this would happen.
Learning point for everyone:
There is a common theme in some of this commentary around obscure faults. It’s that heady combination of physical presence, unexpected behaviour and an outage.With the advent of cloud computing and a move to general acceptance that remote consoles are normal, combined with less and less equipment on site incidents such as the above should, in theory, become less and less likely.
Registered company no. 11869849
VAT number 317720513