Back when I was a trainer (years ago now), we had a little inside joke; it's pretty industry-wide in fact, but it was fun nonetheless.  You've heard of the ID10T (pronounced Eye-Dee-Ten-Tee), of course.  We had another known as the PBKACH (pronounced Peeb-Cache).  Essentially it stood for “Problem Between Keyboard and Chair”.  Well, today I experienced this first hand - literally.

Apparently, this particular server went down on Friday.  That is, no users could connect to it via VPN, all web services were down, the virtual servers were down.  No matter what the users tried a connection could not be established.  Any attempts to connect to or contact the server would fail.

Attempting to reboot the server remotely via the DRAC (Dell Remote Access Controller) interface would freeze at the following screen:

Any attempt to gain physical access to the server over the weekend was denied, but today when we got into the server room the problem was immediately obvious.  It wasn't a hardware failure as suspected and feared.  It was a literal PBKACH error.  In setting up the server rack, apparently the keyboard was placed on top of the server.  Additionally, a folding chair (poised on a small box) was also placed in the rack, precariously positioned above the keyboard:

Well, one thing led to another and the chair had slid off of the box and landed squarely on the ESC key of the keyboard, holding it down.  In and of itself this wasn't much of an issue except when the server rebooted (through an Automatic Update in Windows) the depressed ESC key was aborting the reboot and stalling it out.

No amount of remote access would have been able to remedy the issue - unless, of course, we were to install a 'rumble pack' in the server - I'll have to look into that one.

So after a good laugh, we chalked this one up as a good ol' traditional (and literal) “Problem Between Keyboard and Chair” and moved on.