Back in 2004 we took on a customer that had a couple of smaller servers at their healthcare facility. The former IT provider had installed a new, internal IDE Iomega REV drive in their medical database server. If you've never heard of REV drives, imagine a sort of a "super ZIP drive," only much, much worse. They were found to be prone to all kinds of failures (see REV) and eventually discontinued. For the most part, this customer's REV drive appeared to work fine. But once in a while they'd complain their database would lock up or freeze, so they'd have to go reboot the server during the day.

Enter our technician, David. David was a bright guy but took things crazy personally when it came to IT. He didn't have enough experience as a consultant to understand he shouldn't take everything personally when a customer makes an IT-related decision. So, he was personally offended when the customer decided to sign a contract with an up-and-coming managed copier company for all their printing needs instead of going with the Lexmark MFP solution he had designed for them. The copier company shows up, installs copiers, sets up print queues and drivers (on the server, that's important), scanning; everything. Being in healthcare the customer printed a lot as you could imagine.

Time goes on, and we're fielding their usual IT requests like new users, setting up laptops, assisting with medical transcription software, and so on. While I helped with onboarding, it was David doing most of the day-to-day needs. One day he was on-site and the medical database froze again. The staff tell David this is when they go reboot the server. David becomes livid because in his mind nobody should touch any server except him, and even then, it shouldn't need rebooting during the day. He's now determined to find the cause of the freezes.

With the new copiers still fresh on his mind, he begins to think the cause of the freezing is the new copier queues and print drivers installed on the server. Before you know it, he's reached out to the copier company with all kinds of claims how their PCL5e drivers are crashing the company's server. The copier folks requested a meeting to see what was really going on.

Here's where I come back in. The meeting is held in one of the customer's conference rooms. In it were a few of the customer's practice managers, me, David, a copier tech, and the copier account team lead. One of the managers describes to the copier people what had been going on with the server freezing. With the words barely out of her mouth, David bolts straight up, points a finger at the copier guys, and blurts out, "it's your (expletive) printer drivers crashing the server!!" Never mind that it could be anything else, like a bad drive, bad stick of RAM, or any other hardware issue, but poor David was certain it had to be the copier drivers.

I tell David to sit down and try to save face and describe what I recommend we do. The server was slated for replacement soon anyway, so I proposed bumping it up on the list of priorities. As we end the meeting the customer, being embarrassed by the outburst, asks if I can take over their account again - or at least not let David come back. Very well.

The new server gets approved, installed, and the customer's app migrated without issue. No more freezes, even with the same copier drivers and queues reinstalled on the new server. With their permission, I ask if I could set up the old server in one of their empty rooms at their facility, as I am curious if I could in fact make it freeze. I fire it up offline and log into it locally. I open the medical app using the testing & training database, which contains dummy medical data.

After a few minutes, I see the REV drive light up and start clicking. A reminder this drive is connected internally via IDE (ATAPI). Sure enough, my mouse and keyboard freeze while the drive is trying to read a disk, but it's not having any luck, and it's freezing the entire server's bus. Turns out if you waited a few minutes the server would snap out of it, but it was the Iomega REV drive that caused this customer's woes and not printer drivers after all!