A few years back I got an urgent call to se if I could sort out a server problem at what would become a new customers.
Now this was a family run business that had spent little on IT, but the person running it (The IT that is) had somewhat lost focus. Essentially the call was, can you get here urgently our server is broken and we don’t know what to do.
When I arrived, there was the IT guy sat in his office with the server is pieces while he forensically tried to identify the cause of the problem. Now essentially what had happened was that they had had a major virus attack on the server. It had blue screened and would not reboot. Norman AntiVirus had failed miserably to stop the attack. The IT guy had removed the drives and was scanning them on his laptop via an external adapter hoping to isolate the problem. I’m not sure quite to what end though.
While he was doing this the whole business was going down the pan. I arrived 3 days, yep 3 days after the problem occurred and this guy had made no attempt to rebuild the server and get the business running. There were 4 office staff and 3 engineers and 2 sales guys sat around twiddling their thumbs.
I ordered 4 new discs and the following day returned to rebuild the server. Sadly their backup policies were shoddy but I managed to recover about 70% of their business files and get the business up and running. We priced up a new shiny rack mounted server with RAID and proper file management, accounting and backup which was installed the following month.
