Call me Casamba
I once did lab support for a large semiconductor company. Our IT support had 3 Samba servers on some pretty old hardware/OS. My lab was pointed 1/3 at each server. Yes, there was a DNS Round Robin, but I was told by the Samba admin it sucked, and to point at the 3 discrete servers. When I would notice one of the Samba servers was inevitably down, I would run a script to re-point my lab to the remaining two and send an email off to the Samba server admin informing him which server was down, and that the other two were about to get hit with increased traffic. About a day later, a second Samba server would fall over and I would switch the entire lab to the one remaining server. Again I would email the admin and warn him his last server was about to crater. Of course, a few hours later all Samba services would fail. The first few times this happened, he would ignore me; I suspect because I had recently left that IT team, and management had been trashing my reputation since my departure.
About the 3rd post-mortem I got tired of him ignoring me and threw him under the bus, telling the team that I had repeatedly warned him that one, then 2 of his servers were down. Other customers and IT management on the line was not impressed with his lack of response. The IT team eventually upgraded the hardware and software so the Samba environment stabilized, but that was a whole ‘nother fluster cluck.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
