Yes, exactly. If quick obvious troubleshooting isn't making progress immediately, then unrack it is the smart real-world answer, which is different from the fantasy interview-world answer.

A service outage can be a lot more expensive than new hardware costs. The team can troubleshoot the hardware later, offline, when they have time.

> so, what was the answer, from the lecture? what had you missed?

He never told me and I was too flustered at the time to ask. Which was agonizing because I replayed that damn interview in my head for weeks afterward wondering where I went wrong. (Aside from slightly losing my cool, obviously.)

I didn't get the sense that the answer he was looking for was, "find someone else who can help," or, "bin the whole server and rack a new one," because I remember it being either stated or strongly implied that the hypothetical server did have some problem that could be resolved by a tech at my level. But I could be mis-remembering things, it was a long time ago.

But like I said, in the end it turned out to be a good thing that I didn't get that particular job. At least the interview itself was a very valuable learning experience and I'm grateful for that.

Don't beat yourself up, interviewing is hard, for all parties - usually.

Yep, seems more like a cattle vs. pets question as retold. That may have been a newer concept at the time, so no amount of Socratic reasoning would get you there.