So today, as previously posted, I worked. Our bank is trying out new saturday hours where one IT person has to be on staff in case of issues.

Overall a pretty quiet day, and then I misused the shutdown command.

At our Lansing branch, there’s been a computer on for a few days that still has somebody logged in. It’s been throwing tons of account lockout errors into our logs and flooding the crap out of our logging reports. So, I figured I’d do myself a favor and shut that computer off.

I know the microsoft windows shutdown command very well… It can be used to remotely shutdown or restart computers as long as an administrator account is used. Well, I used my admin account and I typed the command so fast and fluidly that I didn’t realize my mistake until it was all over. “shutdown -s -m \\xxx.xxx.xxx.130” …Hmm… Wait… the computer IP that I wanted to shut down was .30, not .130… shit… what did i just shut off? Pull up our IP list… Double shit. The Lansing domain controller/print server.

A couple people were working at the Lansing branch, but nobody had the necessary clearance to get into the datacenter. And Lansing being a remote market, I didn’t configure HP’s integrated Lights out on that server. There was simply NO possible way to get that server to turn back on aside from driving two hours round trip.

I drove one hour in pouring rain to arrive at our lansing branch, I pushed a power button, and I drove an hour back to GR in pouring rain. But, I stopped at Arby’s at least.