This pilot fish does some freelance IT work, and one of his regular clients comes to him with a strange problem.

“A Linux server at his customer’s remote location had a Samba mount of a Windows server’s share,” says fish. “Every day at around 9:30 a.m., like clockwork, the Linux server would stop responding to any requests on this mounted directory.

“I couldn’t figure it out; nothing was being output on the debug logs. I was about ready to build a new Linux kernel to see if that would fix the problem.”

Before fish can do that, though, he gets a call from the client, who just got off the phone with someone at the remote location. “After a year of dealing with this problem and asking her if there’s anything she does about the time that the server hangs, she finally says, ‘Oh yeah — I reboot the Windows server every day at 9:30 a.m.!’”

Now’s a good time to tell Sharky about your true tale of IT life. Send it to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.