IT ISSUE · SERVERS AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Server offline
A server has stopped responding. A few things are worth establishing before anyone restarts it.The instinct is to restart it, and sometimes that is right. It is worth thirty seconds first to establish whether the machine is off, unreachable, or running and refusing work, because those are three different situations and only one of them is improved by power.
Worth establishing first
- Whether it responds to anything at all, from anywhere.
- Whether the failure began with a power event or a change.
- Whether other equipment in the same place is also affected.
- What was running on it that people need right now.
- Whether anything was mid-write when it stopped.
Restarting is a decision, not a first step
We check reachability, power, storage and service state, and what the logs recorded before it stopped. That usually explains whether this is a service, a disk or the machine.
A restart clears the evidence of why it failed and, on a server that was writing when it stopped, can turn a recoverable situation into a repair. If it's out of hours and nobody is waiting, the safer choice is often not to restart it until someone has looked. Report it anyway, so it's the first thing looked at. If people are waiting, say so and we'll weigh that against the risk with you rather than for you.