We've lost the starboard engine sir!

A penguin controls our email at work and like all good penguins from time to time it needs opening up so upgrades, patches and offensive weapons like machine guns can be added. (Well okay not the guns). I am of course talking about a Linux server rather than a penguin although the bosses probably wouldn't notice the difference.

Now Friday the 13th is known to have people hiding under the coffee table, refusing to move house, wash-up and visit the mother in law. Me? I don't care.

So I decided to complete an upgrade or to be more precise a downgrade. Now, this is where you learn that the mouse button one way will be responsible for nuclear war. A man will one day mean to close an program in a nuclear missile facility only to find he has three minutes to hand in his notice before the boss finds out about his "little" mistake.

Cue my mouse button.

There is nothing like watching a server strip itself of nuts and bolts in a live log; lock you out of the webadmin, the remote shell, kick all the users out like an over zealous doorman and then gradually fail like a plane without an engine until it goes off line and can only sit there aggravating the environmental campaigners with a monotonous hum twiddling it's fingers idly.

Bugger.

It takes folks 30 seconds to notice there’s no email anymore.

Now lesser men would have descended into panic but IT folk are made of sterner stuff. It's not a problem so long as you don't loose the data.

AH...

This is of course where you find the lawyer within you with the explanation.

Boss:
We have lost all our emails?

Answer:
The case has no room to fit a Tape Drive in it and when I mentioned the lack of failsafe in the server, you weren't concerned.

Boss:
What caused it to crash?

Answer:
An upgrade went wrong and it took everything with it in the crash.

Boss:
But we are up and running now?

Answer:
Yes*

*With a little lawyer sidestep as you omit to mention the spam filter tokens have been lost all 370,000 + of them along with the whitelist and you have no idea who was on it and someone is going to be getting a lot more viagra emails than they did before....