Remote hands
Your hardware is in Amsterdam and you are not. Remote hands is the arrangement that bridges that, and it works in proportion to how precisely you ask.
What we can do
- Power-cycle a machine, or press reset
- Reseat a drive, a card, a cable or a memory module
- Swap a drive or a power supply for a spare you have with us
- Move a cable between ports, or replace a patch lead
- Read what is on the console and tell you, or photograph it
- Check a link light, an optic level, a fan
- Receive and rack hardware you have shipped — see shipping hardware to us
How to ask
A good remote hands ticket has four things:
- Which machine — our identifier, from the label on the chassis or the portal. Not just your hostname.
- Exactly what to do, in order, as steps. “Pull the drive in bay 3, wait ten seconds, push it back”, not “have a look at the disk”.
- How to identify the part — a serial number, a bay number,
a port number, or an LED you have set blinking with
ledctl locate. See replacing a failed disk. - What should happen afterwards, so we can tell you whether it worked.
Vague tickets produce a round trip of questions, which on a machine that is down is the expensive part.
What we will not do without confirmation
Anything irreversible or ambiguous. If the instruction says “pull the failed disk” and two disks look equally plausible, we stop and ask rather than guess — in a degraded array, pulling the wrong one destroys it.
The same applies to anything that would take the machine down when you have not said it may, and to instructions that arrive from someone we cannot tie to the account — see who may act on your account.
Leave spares with us
This is the single thing that most improves a bad night. A labelled box in your rack with a spare disk, a spare power supply and a patch lead turns a courier delay into a five-minute swap.
Agree it in a ticket first so support can issue a reference — hardware without one is refused at the door. Label the box with your company name and what is in it.
Rented servers are different
On hardware we provide, you do not need remote hands for failures at all: the part is ours, it is held on site, and our engineers fit it. Just open a ticket saying what failed — see hardware failure.
Remote hands is primarily a colocation arrangement, which is one of the practical differences in colocation or a dedicated server.
Out of hours
Engineers answer around the clock, and the people who answer are the people who can walk to the rack. Mark the ticket urgent when it genuinely is — see when a ticket is not moving.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base