Quote Originally Posted by jwise
Although it was far from funny at the time, in retrospect the whole thing is kind of funny. Joseph's point about the error message is precisely the cause of my grief. I would have investigated the IP address much sooner if the message had simply said "No SQL server there."
That's the nature of IT, isn't it? About two months ago, a consultant and I called VMWare support for an issue we had. We had put one of our servers into maintenance mode, so all of the VM's were supposed to automatically move to the other server, but for some reason they just wouldn't. After two hours on the phone with VMWare, the tech finally checked with his boss and found out that our attempt to set a rule to keep two VM's on separate servers blew the moving ability apart. (It makes sense in retrospect.) Our reponse to him (at 2AM) was... "Do you think that maybe we should get a message about this when we set our rules, or maybe a message back from the system telling us why it's stuck?"

I can't count the number of hours I've wasted on something that would have been simple if only for an (effective) error message.