Once upon a time, in a spooky universe not unlike that of our own, there was a server built with minimum specifications on hardware that was already passed its prime. The server’s hard drive was partitioned into three small drives and somehow meant to host and preserve a repository for a growing collection of digital assets for future generations.

Fast forward eight years and the server started to fail just months after its original technician retired. Ah, but do not fret fore another privy team member was tasked with migrating the server to a virtual machine (VM). The VM has many nice features that would allow the server to grow more than the original physical server ever could. It was a nice option.

But on a dreary day in the full heat of summer, the VM stopped working without any warning. Not only has the original technician retired, but the other team member assigned to work on it has since transferred to another college! Alas, now it is the job of the new guy, Gomez, to figure out what has gone wrong and bring the VM back from the grave.

After researching the system, Gomez discovered a cauldron of problems. The system is running on an old version of Windows Server that will soon no longer be supported, the software running the repository is outdated and its support contract is expired, and the hard drives are full to their brim with not even a MB to spare! Try as Gomez might, no matter what he does, the server will not work. You see, the server was not properly migrated and thus the VM had not transferred the information properly. So the potential to grow was no more. The VM is permanently stunted, forever to remain at its current size for each partition. Gomez searched frantically for something he could safely delete to free up some space, but all he could delete is 12 GB of log files.

He restarted the VM and it worked! But Gomez knows that the VM will only work until 12 new GBs of information are saved so he instructed those utilizing the server to not upload anything until he could conjure a spell that will fix its volume size issues. He renewed the service contract with the repository software company and after some back and forth emails, Gomez determined the only true fix that will give users the freedoms they want and his organization the security it deserves is to completely rebuild the server on his own from scratch— and configure it the correct way.

To be continued . . .