I accidentally fixed something today.

At work we have a tape backup jukebox that is 8 years old. It is currently only being used to back up 2 machines, which are a little older than the jukebox. The whole thing (jukebox and servers, along with a whole bunch of other stuff from the 1990's) will be gone in 2 or 3 months.

The drives in the jukebox stopped working completely yesterday. Only the lady who does the backup report was concerned about it. None of us really wanted to fix it. We called it "Good news and bad news."

We looked at alternate methods of backing up the 2 remaining servers it was servicing. One of the guys in my office was concerned that we would not be able to do restores if the machine crashed tomorrow. I conceeded to go down and hook up one or two tape drives to the backup server so we could do manual restores if we needed to.

When we got down there, I powered off the jukebox. (This was to take some drives out.) I got curious, and powered it on to see what happened. (I had someone do this for me yesterday, the thing never powered up properly.) When I turned it on, the thing came all the way up. An hour later, I had it resynced with the backup software, and they are running backups for 2 servers through it again. It's kind of disappointing in a way. I guess the jukebox just needed to have someone power it on where the threat of cursing it out properly existed. (The guy who power cycled it for me yesterday is just too nice...) Everyone else figures it just needed the magic touch.

If I hadn't fixed it, no one would have really cared, and I would have had another lab machine to play with. Now I have to wait 3 more months to get my hands on it again.