• jackie (unregistered) in reply to Jaco

    I think the captcha system has been taken over by the automated curse generator.

  • Timecube (unregistered) in reply to ochrist
    ochrist:
    Jay:
    @Deprecated:
    The Real TRWTF: "One summer day, at 2am"

    According to thefreedictionary.com:

    day (n)

    1. The period of light between dawn and nightfall; the interval from sunrise to sunset.

    a. The 24-hour period during which the earth completes one rotation on its axis. b. The period during which a celestial body makes a similar rotation.

    Note definition 2. Have you never before heard the word "day" used to refer to a 24-hour period, including both the light and dark parts? I didn't think that was an obscure use of the word.

    TRWTF is that English doesn't have the word 'døgn'.

    Anyway, why not use 'summer night' or 'summer morning' instead?

    TRWTF is that in a long discussion of the meaning of day, no one has brought up this elegant proof which shows that you are all wrong.

  • Sunray charles (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Anon Ymous:
    Retarticle:
    which could only mean one thing: a bomb, a fire, or a giant robot wreaking havoc throughout the city.
    I think someone forgot how to count to ONE.
    You seriously think that all three of those unlikely events might be happening simultaneously? I think it's far more likely to be one of those things rather than all of them.

    I believe the giant robot wreaking havoc is the most likely to happen.

  • (cs) in reply to cconroy
    cconroy:
    Anon Ymous:
    Retarticle:
    which could only mean one thing: a bomb, a fire, or a giant robot wreaking havoc throughout the city.

    I think someone forgot how to count to ONE.

    I think someone knows how to count to one but forgot to STOP.

    No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is bombs... And fires... And giant robots...

  • Todd Lewis (unregistered) in reply to avflinsch
    avflinsch:
    OMG:
    There are two (or three?) levels of redundant servers, but THEY'RE ALL IN THE SAME SERVER ROOM?
    WTF - they shouldn't even be in the same Time Zone
    Because, you know, what if somebody takes a time zone down for maintenance?
  • @Deprecated (unregistered) in reply to Sunray charles
    Sunray charles:
    Anonymous:
    Anon Ymous:
    Retarticle:
    which could only mean one thing: a bomb, a fire, or a giant robot wreaking havoc throughout the city.
    I think someone forgot how to count to ONE.
    You seriously think that all three of those unlikely events might be happening simultaneously? I think it's far more likely to be one of those things rather than all of them.

    I believe the giant robot wreaking havoc is the most likely to happen.

    How about a giant robot that fires bombs?

  • Anony-Mouse (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Anonymous:
    Anon Ymous:
    Retarticle:
    which could only mean one thing: a bomb, a fire, or a giant robot wreaking havoc throughout the city.
    I think someone forgot how to count to ONE.
    You seriously think that all three of those unlikely events might be happening simultaneously? I think it's far more likely to be one of those things rather than all of them.

    Then it should say one of three things not one thing. Or better:

    which could only mean one thing a disaster such as: a bomb, a fire, or a giant robot...

    Now the "one thing" is a disaster, and that one disaster could be any number of things. This was obviously the intent of the sentence.

    [image]
  • SR (unregistered) in reply to Anony-Mouse

    I thought they were the Grammer Nazis

  • Ditto (unregistered)

    We had a similar situation at a university in Sweden. The fan failed on one important server (firewall, main router or something like that) and it died. The official maintenance guy from Sun arrived, turned off the two backup servers and replaced the fans on those too. You know, while he was at it. Data and phone networks down for half a day.

  • plaga (unregistered) in reply to spxza
    spxza:
    As much as I enjoyed the article and agree with most of the comments (except for the bit about the mechanic), I have to admit a dirty little secret: our server rack is open and placed just outside the toilets. A camera does cover the tack, but the camera server is in the same rack.

    Some more confessions: Of the 8 or so server in-house, most of them run Windows XP. The domain controller doesn't have any anti-virus software running on it. Many of the machines we have at clients are running fedora 5. (I don't think this is too much of a problem, except they are a default desktop install, even though their purpose is to stream video) The same root password is used almost everywhere, and is given to most of the employees.

    I've only been here a couple of months, and am a dev, with a bit of . I have so much work to do...

    I hope I don't have an account in your bank...
  • Jay (unregistered)

    Clearly, the mistake here was in putting the backup air conditioner in the same geographical location with the primary air conditioner. They should have put the backup AC at a remote location, so if there was a power failure, natural disaster, or other problem at the primary location, the backup would continue to operate.

    :-)

  • Herby (unregistered)

    As for the definition of "Day", I refer to a 1964 movie and title song: "A Hard Day's Night". Enough said.

  • Cunning Linguist (unregistered) in reply to My Name?
    My Name?:
    Cunning Linguist:
    No, because natural languages don't work that way. But congratulations, you've discovered the heap paradox. Better late than never.
    There is no heap paradox! If a heap contains only 2 elements it is still a heap.
    Heh heh.

    (For anybody who took that seriously, Natural languages are for talking to people. Formal language concepts like data structures or are not applicable to Natural languages, and the heap paradox is a problem of natural language. But now I'm being boring.)

  • Thomas (unregistered) in reply to zeptimius
    zeptimius:
    It's the two repair guys from the movie "Brazil"! See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNFuySgwQ30, starting at 2:57. The guy should have just asked if they had a 27B/6, and they would have left.

    Duly noted and appreciated!

  • illtiz (unregistered) in reply to Helix
    Helix:
    illtiz:
    If they were gunning for three-nines uptime, they should have had another site, but for (say) 99.5% p.a., it's not required (while redundant servers are).

    what about 99.5% per 6 months or 99.5% per 18 months?

    Well, the longer the time frame the easier, right?

  • raboof (unregistered)

    A similar thing happened to an unlamented ex-employer of mine.

    Friday night the town had a power failure. The server and system testing room had all machines well-protected with UPSes. Unfortunately, the air conditioning was on the main line, and it would not start without being manually reset.

    Come Monday, with 10 degree New England winter weather outside, we arrived in the morning to find all doors of the building open in a desperate attempt to cool everything down.

    This was a couple of weeks after 1/1/2000, so I suppose management blamed everything on a Y2K error.

  • Fluk3 (unregistered)

    This can only mean ONE of the following things: 1)W 2)T 3)F

    problems? questions?

  • herdlabor (unregistered)

    I once left a job over this 'everyone has access' issue. There is nothing like getting hammered that you have 'critical systems' and 100% uptime required! BUT when you ask for stupid things like air upgrades and UPS/generator backup you get the runaround.

    Fast forward to when a hurricane hits. Its all your fault and they dont understand why YOU cant get the power company to hop-to-it and get on over to fix it. Like I can get the freakin power company to dance for me. Those yokels badgered me all morning to call and re-call the phone company and power company to the point the Owner of the company stood outside my office waiting for me to call them again as if the repair queue had magically changed.

    OUT I SAY OUT DEMONS OF STUPIDITY. Being free from them was a gift from heaven.

  • Martin (from Germany :-) (unregistered) in reply to derula

    Hm. Wie nennt man es, wenn ein Vertrag nicht fristlos gekündigt wird, sondern mit der falschen Frist irgendwo zwischen fristlos und fristgerecht?

  • Ouch! (unregistered) in reply to Martin (from Germany :-)
    Martin (from Germany :-):
    Hm. Wie nennt man es, wenn ein Vertrag nicht fristlos gekündigt wird, sondern mit der falschen Frist irgendwo zwischen fristlos und fristgerecht?
    Im Zweifelsfall: nichtig.
  • An On (unregistered) in reply to @Deprecated
    The Real TRWTF: "One summer day, at 2am"
    Well, maybe they were in Australia.
  • Stuart (unregistered) in reply to OMG
    OMG:
    There are two (or three?) levels of redundant servers, but THEY'RE ALL IN THE SAME SERVER ROOM?

    That's TRWTF right there. Anything bad happens (power out, flood, robbery, airplane crash, clueless HVAC repairmen) and you've got a single point of failure. I think the AC guys are blameless -- it's the guys who decided to put all their eggs in one refrigerated basket that deserve the blame.

    Dose not compute. Because fault can be found in one area dose not mean it exists nowhere else. Because the design of the system has a fault dose not mean the fucking idiots deciding on their own to take down both ACs at once are "Blameless".

  • coldwater (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    I handle day-to-day server ops at my company. At sundown, everything blinks out of existence, so these conundrums never materialize.

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