The more things change the more they stay the same. Or at least you think they’re the same. How many times have you had something work on one server but not on another and you swear there is no difference between the two?

I was working late last night and rebooted a server only to find out my hypervisor management console stopped working after the reboot. This happened on a server that gets rebooted a lot and I hadn’t applied any patches or made any configuration changes since the last reboot. In other words…nothing had changed. Nothing, that is, except now I couldn’t power up any of my virtual machines - something that was soundly within my list of capabilities 5 minutes earlier.

Is there a security lesson in all of this? Probably. Mostly it was just really annoying. It was one of those moments that made me appreciate the people who keep servers running 99.999% of the time and made me glad I’m not one of them.