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A Tuesday in 2012 when a single bad stick of RAM took down an entire office
Got a frantic call from a small law firm in Charlotte, their whole network was crawling and they were blaming the new server. After four hours of checking configs, I finally pulled and tested each RAM module individually, finding one faulty 4GB stick in the main workstation that was causing constant memory errors across the domain. What's the weirdest single component failure you've seen bring a whole system to its knees?
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samflores2d ago
Had a similar thing with a cheap power supply once. It was making this weird high pitched noise and the whole office would just randomly lose power to half the computers. Took forever to figure out because it would work fine for days then just die. Turns out it was sending dirty power through the whole rack and frying network cards. The smell of burnt electronics still haunts me.
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That power supply story is wild, but honestly a bad stick of RAM causing domain-wide issues is way more bizarre to me. The idea that one workstation's memory could ripple out like that... just doesn't add up in my head.
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