Pulling the Plug

It's that time of year again when our computer rooms have to be completely wiped and reconfigured. We do this by imaging all the computers in bulk, one room at a time from a preconfigured image on our server.

All we have to do is boot each computer in to WinPE, select the image and away they go. They take anywhere from 50 minutes to 2 hours depending on how big the image is. Once they are done we name them, add the printer and move on to the next room. Sounds easy...

One particular year we had been having a few problems with the imaging freezing and "bombing" out halfway through. It took us several days to sort the problems out, including many late evenings and early mornings. Needless to say we were running out of time and we still had over 1000 computers to be imaged.

Now our "temporary fix" was to have a portable server in the room we were imaging. This was considerably slower, but it did the job.

So get a room imaging and on the second attempt we get the process past the 50% mark and close approaching 90% and we all heave a sigh of relief. But not for long because all of a sudden it times-out. No connection to Server (A new error.)

Upon examining the server we find that it is powered down. Not far away is a rather guilty looking man that works in that area.

"Did you switch this off?" we ask suspiciously.

"Not exactly" he said "I just unplugged it so I could change it to a different plug socket."

"WHY?"

"The plug socket looked dodgy, the plug wasn't fitting properly. I thought if I moved the plug quickly enough it wouldn't disrupt anything."

CLEARLY IT DID!

"What was wrong with the plug socket?" We asked him later on.
 
"Oh nothing" he said. "Turns out it just needed pushing in further."

It took us the rest of the day to finish that room.