Friday afternoon is not the time for snap decisions, but weekends are useful to cover your tracks.
Monday mornings can be filled with trepidation and tension, which is why The Register kicks them off with a little light-hearted fun in the form of a new instalment of “Who, Me?”
“Exchange servers, especially onsite ones, were nothing new to me or to be worried about,” Phil told The Register. “The clients I worked with at my previous job were still hosting some local Exchange servers on Windows NT systems with 15 GB drives in 2014!”
Phil therefore felt confident when, late on a Friday, a user reported that email was running slowly, and messages weren’t making it into or out of the building.
While Phil pondered the situation, one of the company’s IT directors came to watch him work. Noticing that Phil was looking at log files, the director told him to delete them.
“I assumed the director knew a bit more about the dark arts of Exchange management than I, so I proceeded to say goodbye to 300GB of log files.”
Phil and the director then logged off, shut the office, and went home for the weekend.
The poor chap who was on call for the weekend was instantly swamped but found time to send Phil a message to ask what was going on.
Despite having deleted the files after being told to by the IT director, Phil spent the weekend doing two things: learning how to repair and rebuild an exchange database with the command line, then doing the job.