some twenty four years ago i managed, amongst others, a company’s samba and print server (that was at the time when all the company’s servers were beige boxes with less memory and disk than the laptop i’m using to type this – and still they served a few hundred employees).

the machine developed a strange custom of hard-resetting itself, which we initially tracked to specific files being sent for printing; the behaviour was fully reproducible.

as it happened, it was a hardware fault somewhere between the mainboard and the integrated SCSI card; installing a separate SCSI card and reconnecting the disks and backup tape device fixed the problem. (i did not have the budget for a new serwer, no.)

establishing the actual cause took me fucking weeks.