What to Do When Nothing is Working

Summary: It’s frustrating when your IT systems or Internet goes down. Dave Hodgdon and Steve Ripper of PCG IT discuss what to do when your company faces IT issues. Listen or read more to learn about what to do when nothing is working.

Mike:  Hey, it’s Tech Tuesday. Tech Tuesday on Power Today by Portsmouth Computer Group, PCG IT. They’ve got convenient locations in Portsmouth and Dover and brand new in Manchester, now open in Portland, Maine. And our good friends Dave Hodgdon and there Steve Ripper. Join us this morning on the WTS channel part of Tech Tuesday. Gentlemen, welcome back to the program.

Dave Hodgdon: Top of the morning to you.

Steve Ripper: Good morning, Mike.

Mike:  Top of the morning, I love that Irish accent by the way.

Steve: That’s the morning. [crosstalk]

Dave: This is the best time of the week for you tech Tuesday, huh?

Mike:  I mean listen, did you have a good weekend? Was the weather great or what? Spectacular. [crosstalk]

Dave: Spectacular. We went to the ocean, but the water is like 52 but we’re playing the bocce ball and ring toss.

Mike:  But knowing you, you would . . . if someone gave you a dare Dave, you would go in the water.

Dave: I went in, but that wasn’t pretty. You got it in and out as fast as you could.

Steve: I was behind a guy yesterday in a convertible. He had the roof up. I was like, it was the nicest day in June that you could possibly ask for. Why wouldn’t you put the roof down? I couldn’t . . . I wanted to knock on his door like, “Hey, what are you doing?”

Mike:  Good to have you with us. And throughout the Tech Tuesdays, we talk a lot about interesting things, about networking, about firewalls, about the new systems out there, the servers, and what you guys need to do. What to do when nothing is working. That is our topic this morning. I would just [crosstalk] shout out to our IT guy or just call them up at five o’clock in the morning.

Your Internet’s Not Working: Now What?

Steve: Right. So, don’t run screaming from the building. Right, and don’t break anything. So, you always get that I’m going to smash this. Why isn’t it working? I’m going to smash it down. Don’t do that.

Dave: And that old keyboard, they turn around and smash it right there.

Mike:  What do you think? What do you think, if you had the most frequently asked . . . most frequently tested problems as far as what’s on the top of the list. What’s not working for them. What’s not working?

Steve: So, always the internet is down. We get that one. If you probably asked our dispatcher, what call does he get the most?

Dave: Oh yeah.

Steve: Gets the most, it’s the Internet’s down. “Why isn’t my internet working?” That’s the big one.

Mike:  We can’t live without that.

Dave: No, you can’t.

Mike:  We know we can, but we, of course, can’t live without that, you know?

Dave: But what’s funny is, as Steve is just going to elaborate on, the Internet’s down, but it’s usually just that one person has the problem. It’s not, like, the whole company, the whole world’s down. The Internet’s down. The Internet’s down. But usually, it’s the simple question. It’s usually a person next to you. The Internet down, and they can’t get their email are probably the two biggest issues.

Mike: But it’s funny how we rely on that and I compare that to electricity. In the old days, when the power’s out . . . you take power for granted. When the power goes out, you figure, “Eh, it will come back on a half hour, 10 minutes,” and then, five hours go by. And then, you’re really . . .

Steve:     So, many companies, Mike. And we’ve talked about this a lot in this show. So many of these companies now, their software is in the cloud, right? So, we’ve been talking about this cloud the whole time.

Mike:  Yeah.

Steve: So, when they’re saying now when they’re saying the Internet’s down, they’re literally saying that what they do for their business also isn’t working. So, it’s actually both there. Where we used to either say, “So, the Internet’s down, but can you get to your program? Can you get to your server? Can you still work while we call Comcast or whoever while we figure out the Internet?” Now, no. “I can’t get my email, I can’t get my program, and I can’t get to the Internet.”

Mike:  So, people should kind of know what their servers look like wherever they might be and get an idea. They don’t have an IT person right there or they’re not calling you guys right away. They should kind of know which lights and bells and whistles or are not on, or going off.

Dave: Good point.

Steve: Yeah. So, we always try to tell companies, “So, listen. If you’re the point of contact and I’m talking to you, try to have one more person. So, if you’re not in, they don’t have to be.”

A lot of people don’t like being having to deal with the IT. I don’t want to deal with it, but they should at least just have enough training to be able to, they know to call us. Maybe they have a phone number for the internet provider as well. They know where the server room is. They can walk around it. Are there lights on or is it really . . . is there anything beeping? Is there any noises? Are there any alarms? Things that you can tell us when you call us, that immediately gets our troubleshooting focused on where the problem might be.

Dave: Yeah. And even though the Internet might be down at the office, a lot of people have their phones now or their iPhones or their Samsung, they probably have Internet access on that through their cell plan that they could probably get their email. But they also really need to realize after calling Comcast, is it really a problem in the building? Is it just us?

Because they still might better work inside the building. They can get to the files, they can collaborate with each other. But when the Internet’s down, a lot of people, your phone’s down.

Mike:  So, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. Is it just our building? Is it just our servers? Or is it kind of a blackout all over.

Dave: Which it happens. We’ve had issues where people hopefully have a generator. It’s one of the parts of having an emergency. You are going to lose power here and there, especially during the storms. But power, you might lose your electricity or you might lose your Internet or both. So, there are ways around that.

Mike:  Yeah, that’s a good point that when you lose power and the computers go down and then, when the power comes up, your computers are all funky.

Steve: So, there’s a whole bunch of interconnected parts. There’s the servers, there’s the firewall, there’s the internet device that Comcast puts in. So, any one of those . . . Maybe two of those three work, but one of them doesn’t come up or start correctly. You still have problems, right?

Mike:  Yeah.

Steve: I actually had a woman at a company. She FaceTimed. She did the FaceTime on her iPhone, and I literally walked down the hall with her. I thought I was in a reality TV show, like the Ghostbusters. I could feel the server room getting closer. And then, she waved the camera around the server room, and she was like, “Look this, this one’s beeping loudly.” And I was like, “Okay, that’s the problem.” I knew right what the problem was. It was great.

Dave: When we lose power in our office, you got 20 people working there. After a few minutes, that’s when the reality sets in. But, that’s where you want it with emergency. Have a backup plans. We have our office in Dover. So, we determine and try to find out, “Is it going to be out for a while? If it’s more than half an hour or an hour?” So, we start picking up our equipment and start dispersing people. Go work from home. Go to the Dover office. Get out on the road. There’s no reason to stay in the building anymore, if there’s no power.

Solving Complex IT Issues

Mike:  Yeah. You guys are the experts on this. Are these most of the time easy fixes or what’s the most complicated thing that you’ve had to deal with as far as maybe taking a couple of hours to fix the system?

Steve: So, the most complicated thing is when the server goes down. If the server, for lack of a better term, breaks badly, like hard drives are down.

Mike:  And why would they go down badly? [crosstalk]

Dave: Hard drive.

Steve: Bad hard drives generally. Or motherboard, hardware failures . . .

Dave: All the machine. No warranty in place. These are the things that as a company like PCG, if you’re proactively monitoring, you’re making sure the equipment’s not getting too old or aging out. Because when you’re using something in your house, your car, you want to depend on it and you want to know it’s going to get you from A to B. If you’re running on a shoestring budget and you’re running your equipment every day with an unknown: it’s going to turn on the next day. The emergency’s coming. [crosstalk]

Steve: Or running outdated operating systems on your computers.

Dave: Absolutely.

Mike:  Okay, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Dave: Red flag. Exactly. Definitely. [crosstalk]

Steve: The servers are complicated to fix when they’re down and there’s risk involved. Did we lose the data? Is there a good backup? When it’s the Internet down, there isn’t really any risk. I mean, it’s annoying that it’s not on, but the fix is either Comcast . . . whoever the provider is. Are they down? What’s going on? Do they need to replace equipment, or if it’s a piece of hardware on the inside, what we would normally call a firewall. There’s usually a warranty on it, Mike. And they’ll ship it or we have an extra one that’s like replacing a part in your car. We’ll bring another part out, we’ll put it in and get you back up.

It’s the server ones that are like, “All right. Did we do enough planning? Did the company do enough planning ahead of time? With us or not with us? Is there a backup? Is there hardware? Is there a support contract?” All of that. All those fun things.

Preventing IT Failures

Mike:  Yeah. So, let’s talk about what companies can do to kind of prevent some of this from happening. I mean obviously backups are important. Extra equipment, I guess, would be important. But what if you can’t use this stuff? What can companies do to prepare better for that day? If that happens?

Dave: One thing is you got to look at your inventory, your asset inventory, what we have as an organization and it comes down to the planning, Mike. Where does an organization want to be in business? IT is a key component of that. You just can’t keep on running on outdated equipment. So, we always like that little 20-mile March as you can consistently, as Steve just said, that firewall. If the firewall is down, there’s no internet. Well, hopefully you have a backup plan for that.

Yeah. Most businesses now, if they’re relying on the cloud, you can’t have just one internet. You need the second one. So, whether it’s a Verizon or it’s a Conversant or whatever. You need a backup internet line. Because when the cloud’s dead, as Steve said, I’m relying on the cloud, I can’t work, but I have a backup line I can run.

Steve: So, we call that risk-assessment. If internet is so important to you, then, maybe that cost monthly for the second internet line in some fail-over in the firewall is worth it. You need to risk-assess. So, of course, having an IT company that knows your internal, has an inventory of what you have. We always talk about labeling equipment. Sounds pretty basic. Why do I have to label it? I know that that’s my server. You know it’s your server, but maybe the person during the day of the emergency doesn’t. So, when I’m on the phone with them, do they know what I mean? [crosstalk]

Dave: Good point.

Steve: Clearly labeling things is a very simple way to really plan ahead for when that moment happens. Support contracts. You’ve heard us talk a little bit about support contracts. So, if you have a HP server having a support contract, they will take your phone call right away. They will ship you a part within four hours. UPS is pulling up with a new part. They’ll even send on-site service. Same thing with your firewall. So, if you have Fortinet. You have a Cisco. Having support contract means that warranty-wise, they’re going to ship something right away. We can put something in right away. So, these are all things that you can do. I talked a little earlier about having someone else in the organization who’s just ready to make the phone call, knowing who the phone numbers are to call, our phone . . . call our number, Comcast number, whoever it is. Support contracts, labeling, and knowing . . . let’s be honest, Mike. A really good IT company, support company should know you’re down before you do. [crosstalk]

Dave: Yeah. That’s part of the emergency.

Steve: They should know.

Mike:  Interesting. Yeah.

Steve: We should know . . . and we do that quite a bit. Where we’ll call and go, “Hi. We noticed that you’re down. Why are you down?” I’ll ask them, “Why are you down?” And they’ll go, “I don’t know. Isn’t that . . . don’t you know?” [crosstalk] And It’s like, “Well, I do know you’re down. I’m trying to figure out the rest part of it.”

Mike:  There you go.

Dave: Some of those points Steve was talking about. We call it the RTO. The Recovery Time Objective is that, “You can lose power. How long can I be down before it’s a major problem?”

Mike:  Right.

Dave: Because you’re paying your people. That’s where that second Internet line comes down. That’s where Steve talked about just like buying insurance. You hope you never have to use it on your house, but if you don’t have insurance on your server and it goes down, you could be down one, two, three days.

Mike:  Yeah. Good point.

Dave: Is that worth it? And a nice thing with PCG is your backup there. He had, we have spare computers, we have a spare server, we have a spare firewall. We have the ability as we’re practically monitoring, cause a lot of machine servers have multiple drives just because one goes bye-bye . . . I think it’s the donut tire that you put the donut on my car. I can still get by and we’ll get you by, but we know it before it becomes a major problem, and we’re replacing that drive.

Mike:  All right, sounds good. David and Steve from a Portsmouth Computer Group joining us this morning. Tech Tuesday. So, what to do when nothing is working. Don’t scream. [crosstalk]

Dave: Don’t screwing away.

Steve: Yeah.

Mike:  Don’t scream. Don’t go crazy. [crosstalk]

Steve: Don’t break anything.

Dave: Don’t break anything.

Mike:  Don’t go postal. [crosstalk]

Dave: We had a guy throw computers through the window. One of our customers that was posted. [crosstalk]

Mike:  Oh, don’t do that. Don’t do it. [crosstalk]

Steve: It doesn’t help it.

Mike:  I’ve always seen people to take a sledgehammer to a computer screen in the movies.

Dave: It was priceless. [crosstalk]

Steve: You’ve probably seen it live. I don’t know. I don’t know. Thank you guys for the input, of course, Portsmouth Computer Group of locations in Manchester and Portland, Maine, the brand new ones. And, of course, here the sea coast. Portsmouth and Dover. Check them out. PCG IT for world-class IT service and customer support. Just check out their website pcgit.com. Dave, good to see you. Thank you. [crosstalk]

Dave: Always a pleasure.

Steve: Good to see you again at Tech Tuesday. Always a pleasure to have you guys both here every Tuesday morning about 7:40.