When in Doubt - REBOOT!

Firecell

The lead Enterprise Helpdesk tech at my organization has the following quote on his email signature.

"When in Doubt - REBOOT!"


What is your opinion of this?

LOL?

atorven

Strongly agree.

nhpr

Only applicable to those silly, impractical Windows machines!

blargoe

Depends you your perspective. Most competent service desk managers hate that philosophy. At my company, after soliciting feedback, a recurring theme a few years ago was "why bother calling, they'll just tell me to reboot" or they would instead spend hours on google looking for a fix, possibly screwing things up worse by taking problems into their own hands.

Sometimes, you just gotta reboot. But too often this has been the default answer to everything because staff are either too busy, too lazy, or not trained to troubleshoot the actual problem.

Version4

Rebooting is a common fix for a long list of issues, I don't see why it is ridiculed so much. It is just another tool in the toolbox. I'm not sure that I would put that phrase on an email signature though.

swild

We have such a complex environment with many services and dependacies, many issues can't be fixed without a reboot. I do believe that my company is an exception, not the rule. In our case, yes, reboot and if that doesn't fix it, call the help desk.

We have new core i5 laptops and they still require 10 to 15 minutes to fully start up. I have stripped down windows on my laptop so it only takes me 7 minutes, but I do have to go to the command line and services.msc to get the programs I rarely use to work.

As to answer your question, this should not be case. This is usually a first impulse by those that don't know enough about what they are supporting. Unfortunately, most companies I have worked for believe that you shold have the knowledge already or learn as you go, instead of training you in the programs you are expected to support.

Zartanasaurus

If a reboot or a profile rebuild didn't fix it, reimage the PC.

Anonymouse

I figured this was common. Everywhere I worked a lot of the weirdest and sometimes unexplainable problems go away with a reboot whether it be a users workstation or a server. It used to drive my crazy at my last job when the shift before mine would leave notes on servers telling me that it's down and the issue needs to be escalated to the system engineers, 100% of the time a reboot resolved the issue. The guy trying to escalate the issue was in helpdesk for like 10 years so that could explain it though. Usually I tell users to reboot like once a week so we don't deal with that crap but a lot of times they think that logging off to the ctrl+alt+del screen is the same as restarting.

SteveLord

Since I am familiar with all of my equipment and the staff that use them, I usually know when to recommend it and when I don't believe it will do anything. Our current database application is like that. Once in a while, it will crash and it hangs when loading it up again. Happens to everyone. 1 minute to reboot versus several minutes of toying around? Like previously said, sometimes it will magically fix an issue.

Ryan82

Its a common solution to a lot of problems but is too often the first troubleshooting step by technicians that lack solid troubleshooting skills. Your first answer to "this isn't working" shouldn't be to reboot and when you work in any sizeable environment supporting many users is not really an option without significant justification as to why it requires such drastic measures.

pham0329

Eh, I'll only have someone reboot if I'm completely out of ideas, and I think it'll help. For example, if someone can't access something, and the permissions checks out on my end, I'll have them logoff/on or reboot. But if they're having problems connecting Outlook to Exchange, I'm not going to tell them to reboot their PC...

Timber Wolf

But i thought rebooting 3 times fixed everything! But really a simple reboot is often times all you need to do for some small problems. Just need to understand that its not going to fix everything.

ChronusMaximus

It is a tool/technique like anything else. Only use it if it applies. Software can be big and complicated and sometimes a quick reboot will cause everything in memory to be dumped and start over fresh. This is helpful when you know something is hung in memory/cpu queue but it would take you longer to hunt down the offending process rather than quickly rebooting. Rebooting is only useful for for the random X process hit an error and can't recover. Obviously if the same program is crashing you should find out the root cause but if its a random glitch why waste up to 20 or 30 minutes on the user's computer when you can get them back into production in less than 5?

cyberguypr

In most of the environments I've worked we had a high ticket resolution rate thanks to reboots. My last environment was mostly 180-200 drone workers who only used web based apps and the MS Office suite. For them a reboot solved issues over half the time. The help desk made a "reboot first" campaign and we saw tremendous reduction in the number of tickets. By the time we added the "issue not present after rebooting" tickets the percentage was real big.

As swild mentioned it all depends on your environment, as some have a zillion custom apps and numerous dependencies where you really have to drill down when the stuff hits the fan. My current environment is mostly developers so the reboot first barely works as the issues are more complex.

In my opinion the only thing worst than a reboot is the "reimage the PC" approach. 10 years ago I worked at a place were application specialists would contact the help desk requesting reimaging. We are talking anywhere between 5-15 images any given week for issues that didn't take that long to solve.

apexgtp

To those who say a reboot is only for people who have no better trouble shooting skills, you all have NO clue what you're talking about. Until you do, maybe you shouldn't give advice and telling us that a reboot is too "amateur".

alxx

reboots can solve lots of problems on windows , some on linux and mac.

Nothing like watching someone trying to install something on linux that needs kernel drivers just after they've updated but without rebooting
(new kernel installed but not running)

Reboots are just the same as hard resets or network resets on smart phones.

Windows 7 can make things more difficult. Whats worse is when half the programs you use need local_admin permissions to run properly
so the IT department tells you to just login as local admin.

snokerpoker

As others have mentioned, it comes down to knowing your environment. I used to work with a guy who sounds like your co worker with the over the top email signature. He used to tell users to reboot for just about everything. I think a part of it was to get them off the phone so he could get off the phone with them and then ignore their subsequent calls.

blargoe

Clearly, for some issues rebooting and starting clean is the correct answer and totally appropriate to get someone working again. Really my biggest beef is when our users are rebooting 3 or 4 times a day because they can't get anyone that is willing to actually spend more than 2 minutes looking at their problem and fixing it.

effekted

Step 1. Clear cookies and cache
Step 2. Reboot

Anytime I'm in the office and my colleague is taking a Helpdesk call on speaker I'll usually joke around and yell out to clear cookies and cache. A manager was calling in once because their team couldn't access an application during an outage... (I manage the servers and etc. powering it) and I asked her if she had them clear cookies and cache and she didn't find the joke funny. The cool folks will respond with "yes and I've rebooted!".

I usually have someone with the vendor's support recommending a server restart when troubleshooting the applications many problems. We're a 24/7/365 shop so its always an inconvenience.

TLeTourneau

When I was about the only tech supporting a 550 user network our intranet support site had a banner that advised users to reboot before calling the helpdesk. According to our internal anonymous surveys that cleared about 85% of the problems.

Chris:/*

You work in my world with that philosophy (When in doubt reboot) you would be fired. When you work on a workstation a reboot theoretically (unless services are badly linked) would only affect one user. You reboot some servers you could take down an entire grid of interdependent machines that are running just fine. A reboot often clears up valuable traces of evidence that point to the actual problem that WILL often rear its ugly head some time again in the future. this is the difference between Tier 1 technicians and Tier 3 and it is why my team is very cautious about hiring ex-desktop support or help desk personnel. The bad habits many have picked up over years of farmed out support do not mesh well with engineer level work.

It used to be if you saw continual issues with desktops and Windows servers, your trend analysis would point to a problem with the images being used. The images would be fixed to prevent the problem in the future. At the same time the fix would be pushed to the desktops if possible. Today we instead have people who follow the standard pattern "Clear cache -> Reboot -> Google for answer - > Reboot -> Give up and Re-Image and restore from backup if you have them."

I personally see this as a change because of the change in IT landscape where the professional knowledge level at each tier has severely decreased.

N2IT

I think it depends on what your role is. For the tier 1 helpdesk the reboot is a perfectly good fix. Sometimes you will have releases to workstations that get hung or require a reboot. Especially for an emergency fix and you will have half the company calling in complaining about the availability about the service. A reboot is the correct answer at that point. Other times the reboot is a waste of time and something to merely "try".

Router adminstration etc rebooting is bad because the logs are cleared. At least from my low level experience you never wanted to reboot the router until you had a chance to view the logs. So having the end user power cycle the router was a no-no. Servers are different as well, sometime you have to reboot if a patch or install gets hung, but usually I just stopped a service and restarted the service to get the server back up and running again.

SteveLord

This mug is part of my "display" on my desk at work. Thread reminded me of it.






That...and this one.

alxx

Chris:/* wrote: »

You work in my world with that philosophy (When in doubt reboot) you would be fired. When you work on a workstation a reboot theoretically (unless services are badly linked) would only affect one user. You reboot some servers you could take down an entire grid of interdependent machines that are running just fine. A reboot often clears up valuable traces of evidence that point to the actual problem that WILL often rear its ugly head some time again in the future. this is the difference between Tier 1 technicians and Tier 3 and it is why my team is very cautious about hiring ex-desktop support or help desk personnel. The bad habits many have picked up over years of farmed out support do not mesh well with engineer level work.

It used to be if you saw continual issues with desktops and Windows servers, your trend analysis would point to a problem with the images being used. The images would be fixed to prevent the problem in the future. At the same time the fix would be pushed to the desktops if possible. Today we instead have people who follow the standard pattern "Clear cache -> Reboot -> Google for answer - > Reboot -> Give up and Re-Image and restore from backup if you have them."

I personally see this as a change because of the change in IT landscape where the professional knowledge level at each tier has severely decreased.

Part of the problem can be due to lack of separation between development, testing and production environments.
Seen and know of cases where they have all merged into one
(cases where lead developer was also lead systems admin - don't get me started)

Other problem is with some vm setups, if the main one freezes/service goes down etc, the backup or a copy is auto started, which
can act/cause similar problems to rebooting a server.

Slowhand

I wonder if most of us aren't missing the tongue-in-cheek undertones of an email signature like that. I'm guessing it's probably not a helpdesk policy, so much as it's a reminder that the lead helpdesk tech watches The IT Crowd. If it were me, I'd assume it was in jest unless given reason to think otherwise.

Bokeh

I still like the sign that hung above the computer maint supervisor when I was in the military:

If at first you don't succeed, hit it with a bigger hammer.

joehalford01

You're environment is obviously different, of course someone isn't going to re-boot a server that's interconnected with a whole grid of machines. There's a big difference between that and a small call center that needs the only server back up and running in a few moments. I agree about knowledge level being decreased, companies don't want to pay for people with knowledge, and as soon as those people get knowledge, they go somewhere willing to pay them for it.
I also see an issue here with time savings, some companies don't want to hire enough techs to actually perform trend analysis and to troubleshoot issues that can be fixed with a simple re-boot.

Chris:/* wrote: »

You work in my world with that philosophy (When in doubt reboot) you would be fired. When you work on a workstation a reboot theoretically (unless services are badly linked) would only affect one user. You reboot some servers you could take down an entire grid of interdependent machines that are running just fine. A reboot often clears up valuable traces of evidence that point to the actual problem that WILL often rear its ugly head some time again in the future. this is the difference between Tier 1 technicians and Tier 3 and it is why my team is very cautious about hiring ex-desktop support or help desk personnel. The bad habits many have picked up over years of farmed out support do not mesh well with engineer level work.

It used to be if you saw continual issues with desktops and Windows servers, your trend analysis would point to a problem with the images being used. The images would be fixed to prevent the problem in the future. At the same time the fix would be pushed to the desktops if possible. Today we instead have people who follow the standard pattern "Clear cache -> Reboot -> Google for answer - > Reboot -> Give up and Re-Image and restore from backup if you have them."

I personally see this as a change because of the change in IT landscape where the professional knowledge level at each tier has severely decreased.

Devilry

This is precisely my method! Just another tool in the toolbox.

erpadmin

Chris:/* wrote: »

...this is the difference between Tier 1 technicians and Tier 3 and it is why my team is very cautious about hiring ex-desktop support or help desk personnel. The bad habits many have picked up over years of farmed out support do not mesh well with engineer level work.

It used to be if you saw continual issues with desktops and Windows servers, your trend analysis would point to a problem with the images being used. The images would be fixed to prevent the problem in the future. At the same time the fix would be pushed to the desktops if possible. Today we instead have people who follow the standard pattern "Clear cache -> Reboot -> Google for answer - > Reboot -> Give up and Re-Image and restore from backup if you have them."

I personally see this as a change because of the change in IT landscape where the professional knowledge level at each tier has severely decreased.

I don't necessarily disagree with you on this, but since I'm friends with a Level 1/2 guy (who takes calls and repairs machines), I kind of understand the mindset.

Many times, rebooting a machine is all it takes. Especially if Patch Tuesday came and went but did not reboot your machine. Now of course, this would be fine and dandy if my shop used WSUS or some patch management system, but we don't and a lot of others dont. A lot of shops can't spell QA, let alone practice it...

In any event, when you're dealing with a small shop and a lot of calls, plus the pressure to get calls closed yesterday, you're going to take the shortest route to the endpoint of the line. A couple of hours to reimage a machine that some user messed up, or a couple of days doing some actual troubleshooting (with or without google....) Help Desk folks are going to take the former. And anyone who swears they don't use Google to fix a technical problem, is ridiculously full of ----. I don't give a d'm if you're a Ph.D of Computer Science who could build a network out of a toothbrush, figs and leaves like MacGuyver....researching a problem on Google is just smart.

jamesp1983

I try to exhaust every option before doing this.

Tackle

jamesp1983 wrote: »

I try to exhaust every option before doing this.

If it's not something that I have seen before or google doesn't turn up many results I suggest the user restart. If it doesn't fix it, at least it gave me some more time to research.

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

If a reboot or a profile rebuild didn't fix it, reimage the PC.

Hahaha. I can just imagine a few people I know that would work like that. I try to be careful as we don't have any images (Lots of different hardware), so I actually have to install Windows, then drivers, then software and configure.