By Bob Bell
Princeton, New Jersey April 16 – On a sunny, cool early spring afternoon, Vital Voice & Data Technicians Kevin Furlong and Justin Christopher arrived at the Yardville Supply Company, headquartered in Princeton, ready to take on the endeavor of revamping the esteemed client’s computer networking system. A task, the likes of which Senior Tech Furlong had performed countless times in the past, yet still a challenging deed for any veteran. For the newly indoctrinated Christopher, this was a learning experience he would carry with him for the rest of his career.
The duo embarked on this assignment, around 3pm, equipped with a brand new Dell PowerEdge T320, a modest 32 Terabyte industrial server powered by Intel Technology. The process began smoothly, all of the roles were transferring, the DNS migrated, and the permissions were all copying properly. Things were going well, too well some might say because just then the team ran into a major obstacle.
The techs demoted the old server, effectively removing it from the system, and coordinated all of the pointers to the new T320, or so it appeared. When the new server had been activated, the technicians soon realized that the software used to manage the servers had dramatically failed. The demotion had a hidden error occur, now both servers were active and operating on the same name and IP address. Systems all over the network were puzzled as two which server was the primary. “It was chaotic…but we took a step back, assessed the situation, and executed the solution” Kevin Furlong, VVD Tech. The team had to manually enter the registry and determine the primary from the imposter. Once the culprit was revealed, it was terminated from the system.
From that point on, it was business as usual, as the techs completed the install all before Yardville business hours began the next day. “The new network server was a much needed upgrade done by the right guys at the right time…Thank you Vital Voice & Data” Steve Nash, CFO. It was no thanks needed for the VVD team who simply take pride in being able to solve a client’s technology issues. Today it was a server install, tomorrow it might be an entire phone network; but one thing is for sure, when the phone rings, this duo will be there to answer the call.
