“Hey, there was a problem this afternoon with the application mail relay.”
I adore anecdotal problem reports. Oh, there was a problem with the mail server? I’m sure I can find it in the 546,291 log entries for today.
“Did you happen to note the error message?” I reply.
“Would that help?”
No. Error messages are just annoyances, and never to be recorded for troubleshooting.
“Yeah, that’d be handy. Or, maybe you could tell me what time the error occurred.”
“Hmmm, okay.”
…two hours pass…
“The error occurred again.”
“What was the error?”
“I don’t know but it’s happening on all of our web servers.”
“You know, that’s actually the most helpful thing you’ve said.”
There are really only three things this server will suffer from. The antivirus scanner might go nuts, a ton of slow connections might make it hit sendmail’s process limit, or it gets slammed and the load goes through the roof. I had been watching the server since the initial report and just happened to see the problem occur again. It would have been nice to have a decent error report, though.
My favorite off all time was from a commercial asking for your favorite stupid support request:
“Um, is the latest version of the Internet installed on my computer?”