Odd Tools and Techniques for System Administrators

Posted by Joseph Kern on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Joseph Kern
Published on 2009-06-17T18:21:25Z Indexed on 2010/04/06 14:13 UTC
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There's been a lot of questions centering on Software Tools for System Administrators. But I would like to know about any odd physical tools or techniques that you've used; Something that you never expected to be useful, but ended up saving the day.

I'll go first:

A Camera Phone.

An application server had a major power issue that borked the RAID. Many of the disks were offline. Before I took the plunge and forced disks back online, I took a picture of the RAID BIOS screen with my camera phone. Having the exact layout of the RAID stored safely in my pocket, I was able to reset the RAID, and reboot the server.

What odd tools/techniques have you used?

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