We all know the bogeyman is alive and well in IT. He takes many forms, though he tends to follow erratic patterns of display, sometimes lying dormant for weeks or months, and sometimes taking residence seemingly forever. But make no mistake: He’s always ready to strike.
It could be something as simple as a desktop or server that suddenly refuses to power on or to boot properly, yet when inspected, it performs perfectly. Then it fails again for no apparent reason days or weeks later. Usually the only way to break this cycle and banish the ghost in the system forever is to dump the hardware in question.
The bogeyman also lives in the wires, the nervous system of IT. Occasionally a link will go batty or a particular Ethernet port will shut down or a big switch will suddenly toss into the logs bizarre errors that even the vendor has never seen. These are episodes that we in IT chalk up to hardware failure, after we’ve dug deep enough into the problem to determine it’s not a “normal” issue stemming from a bad configuration setting or the like.