the life of a System Administrator

OK, here’s the first funny story I want to publish.

In the summer 2009 I had prepared two new, great servers – HP DL380 G6 with 2 Xeon E5520 @ 2.26GHz, 32GB RAM and disk enclosure filled with 146GB 15K SAS disks for each server. They were going to run Exchange 2007 in a CCR configuration for high availability. Since the old configuration was a 32 bit environment with 2 DL380 G4 servers in an old Veritas cluster configuration I was expecting outstanding performance and that’s what I got but one of my users wasn’t so satisfied.

I spent more than 14 hours (no sleep) on migrating data and were quite satisfied when it was over. I didn’t get any errors or ran into any unexpected problems. Of course I instructed my users to contact me directly if they were experiencing any problems that would be related to the recent migration. Of course I got a few calls because OWA had changed etc., nothing big. However after a day or two a not so satisified user called me. Here’s the conversation.

User: Hi. Since you made those changes to our system my Internet is very slow.
Me: What changes are you referring to (surely he couldn’t be referring to the exchange migration).
User: Well, you made those changes to the e-mail system the other day. www.krak.dk is taking more than 7 minutes to load on my computer.
Me: OK, that sounds strange.
User: Yeah, it started right after you made the change so I’d like you to change it back as this is unacceptable.
Me: I’m pretty sure this has nothing to do with the changes I made to the e-mail system.
User (insisting): Well, I’m pretty sure that it has. You must admit that it is strange this happens right after you have made those changes.
Me: Yeah, you know what. I’m gonna have to look into this and we’ll call you back within the hour. OK?
User: OK, thank you.

I asked a supporter to call back and let him know the background of the call. We had a good laugh, but how should the user know any better? . I didn’t hear from the user again, so I guess they figured it out.