Oops

Yesterday at 4AM, I decided to get some work done. I decided to apply some patches to a couple of servers, at work, that needed some patching. Unfortunately I accidentally logged into our mail server and started patching it. One of the patches required a reboot, so I did the reboot. Actually I tried to do a reboot. It didn't work out so well.

The server didn't come back up. I was in a different city and couldn't go in to take care of that fact. After 45 min of desperate hoping, I decided that I had to get someone to go into the office to see what's going on. I called a coworker who lives close to work and got him to go into the office to see what was up with the server not coming back up.

When he got to the server he gave me a call and told me that the server was stuck in a part of the POST (Power On Self Test). There was a message at the bottom of the screen that contained the phrase "...press F2 to continue." I hate that. When you reboot a server it should just boot up normally. It shouldn't ask you any stupid "are you sure" questions. My coworker pressed F2 and then the server came back up.

Unfortunately, after the server came back up it wasn't accepting mail from the Internet. After about an hour of testing and coaxing, I finally got the damn thing to behave the way it's supposed to.

Oops. Doing something on the wrong server is a bad thing. Rebooting the wrong server and then not having it come back up, on its own, is an even worse bad thing.

I hate computers.

I say that at work a lot. People think I'm joking.