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Latest Victory

I’m always surprised at the reaction I get from clients when I come in and “save the day.” Even people who I feel have stronger skills in their niche will ask for me by name and drop praise on me when I finish. As much as I enjoy the confidence, I’m usually made uncomfortable by it.

My latest was at a client who only calls us for the really strange problems. He is very savvy and setup most of his systems by himself. The Macs live in an AD environment leveraging ADmit Mac and NetBoot for reimaging. He has just started adding in Intel Mac Pros into the mix and needed to create new netboot images for those machines. Strangely, the Intel Mac Pros would hang on the freshly created image. The boot pinwheel would just spin forever.

So, running through my standard process of elimination troubleshooting techniques I began to NetBoot the Mac and then switch it to verbose mode (command + v). I could then watch the boot process for any errors that might occur. It finished with an “Image not found” error pointing to a specific framework and then asking to be rebooted.

I did the only logical thing I could do. I took a working copy of said framework and added it to the NetBoot image. Once rebooted and told to NetBoot the workstation came right up. Simple as that.

The client praised me for my fast fix and I went on my way. I don’t really know that I’m doing anything more than anyone else would but I have definitely gained the title of “Go-To Guy.”
I’m waiting for the day that truly backfires on all of us…

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

No Responses to “Latest Victory”

  1. Myself Says:
    June 12th, 2007 at 9:34 pm

    Thank goodness there aren’t many out there that know everything, because most of us are niche players (at best) – and I should know (I humbly submit myself as an archetype of the species). Sure, there’s probably someone else that could have done it… (was it George Carlin that quipped, “even if I’m one in a million there are 300 people just like me?”)… but not everyone can (and the other 299 might have been unavailable).

    So revel in the glory of your niche.

    In the mean time I’m going to go and hide, lest my wife see this comment and give me a whoopin’ with the “heed your own words” stick.

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