In the heady days of Novell 3.12, DOS 5.xx and POS software that ran on DOS...
...client of mine got a new server with a VLB IDE controller card (ooh, fancy, fancy), dual IDE HDD's and, of course, Novell 3.12
VLB was supposed to be faster with SFTII setups (disk mirroring).
Set up Novell, restore data successfully from a backup of their old server, configure all, and ship it off to the client on a Friday afternoon.
Saturday I got woken rudely by my pager doing its beepery stuff. Phoned the client, heard server shitted itself. Went there, rebooted, and got the dreaded Non-system disk or disk error message.
Took it to the office with their backup. Reinstall Novell, throw all their shit back on the server and took it back.
30 minutes later the client rang again. Same story. Took it back to the office, ripped out the fancy VLB IDE card, punched in a standard IDE controller card, reinstall all the shit, and everybody was happy thereafter.
Chucked said VLB IDE controller card into a common heap for somebody else's delight...
(Luckily for me there was no internet or internet access at that time, access being with archie, telnet and FTP... )
Biting the hand that feeds IT
