Putting a 'spanner' in the works

Some of you might be interested to know that I spent a number of years working as a system administrator at a mid-sized company. Even when I shifted over to programming and system analyst roles, I normally was the get-to person for solving inexplicable or challenging systems problems. Perhaps my hardware knowledge has to do with me being a hands-on kind of person. After all, I have also fixed (and built) my fair-share of "white box" machines assembled from individual components.

But something interesting happened over the years. I started to shy away from building desktops from scratch. I admit that price erosion is one consideration--the savings you get from a DIY-box just aren't what they used to be anymore. The real reason however, has to do with the fact that I find it is very time-consuming to support such machines.

The bottom line is that most machines fail after a while. When that happens, I personally prefer having a vendor come over to identify and replace the problematic component. Most times, it only takes a single component to fail in order to halt the entire desktop: a dead motherboard battery, an overheated processor, failed hard disk drives, misbehaving network interface cards (NIC), etc., etc.

Hence it was with a sense of déjà vu that I read about how a single, intermittently working NIC caused the radar system at Dublin Airport to shutdown. It put a "spanner" in the works, so to speak. Has a similar scenario happened to you before? If so, tell me about it. - Paul