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Admin
Ah, a VB programmer....
Admin
"Shared dedicated" is one of my favorite marketing terms. You sell someone on the fact that they own their slice of the machine, forget the fact that no matter how well you virtualize, someone can take down the whole thing.
Captcha: Darwin - his ghost walks the halls where I work, waiting for ideas like shared dedicated to ensure the survival of the fittest.
Admin
Are you part of the cleaning crew at my office? Every few months I have to have conversations with them for this problem. Because, of course, it's too expensive to run 10' of wire and put in a new breaker for the server UPS's. and you always wait until I am at least 100 miles out of town before you decide to use that plug....WTF
Admin
Are you part of the cleaning crew at my office? Every few months I have to have conversations with them for this problem. Because, of course, it's too expensive to run 10' of wire and put in a new breaker for the server UPS's. and you always wait until I am at least 100 miles out of town before you decide to use that plug....WTF
Admin
Admin
The last of the IT budget had just been spent on free stickers for TDWTF's readers...
Admin
Dear WTFer. It has come to our attention that the D in PDQ stands for Damned, which is offensive to some readers as a curse word. in order to align with the rewording of the site name to worsethanfailure to avoid the connotations with the F-word often associated with WTF, we need you to stop using PDQ and instead type out prettydarnedquick in order to not offend those who may be offended.
At least until grandma starts pointing out that darned is also a knitting term and thus not appropriate to use because some knitters may object to the use of darned in a potentially negative connotation. At which point we will fallback to our second choice which is plentydonequietly. Yes we understand that it has no bearing on what you intended, but grandma will indeed be pleased.
Sincerely, The New Management
... hehe
Admin
Dude, that's worse than failure.
Admin
I worked for a power station that had set a new record price when it was privatised and had been losing money steadily ever since. All our comms data and phone were located in a large building once filled with (power) network testing staff but was now empty except for our gear and rooms full of boxes of paper archives. After a heavy downpour we found the ceiling tiles over the PABX had collapsed from the weight of water and the console had shorted. The was also ominous drips over the data comms racks.
The solution... beautifully made sheet metal 'umbrellas' were suspended over all critical equipment with the idea that any water would run done into the deserted ground floor (umm, what about those archives guys?).
Eventually repairmen came and stipped off the old bitumen roof coating to repair it and then decided the weather didn't look so good and left for about a year. We ended up with sandbagged tarps on the roof until the following spring. They never really understood that no a/c and lots of dust and moisture were a bad environment. After all the coal dredgers worked in it!
captcha: bathe
Admin
The best one of these I've seen was the data center at a research facility for one of the biggest car companies in the world. Huge place 100's of acres, amazing offices, with cars INSIDE, to be talking points in various reception areas etc. (they must have had a giant elevator somewhere and some big ass dollies). Anyhow, I was there to install some new routers, escorted down to the basement, then to the sub-basement - bare concrete walls, bare light bulbs, planks setup on milk crates to walk on because of the 6 inches of water everywhere! No IT kit anywhere in sight, finally we reach the datacenter, nice secure door, then inside raised flooring, dropped ceiling, looks like a proper server room.
I start installing kit and lift a tile to find some power - only to find 6 inches of water and lots of leaves and mud. The cables were carefully suspended from the top of the false floor support posts, out of the water, but once good rain could change that...
Admin
Erm, most of the emergency lights I've seen have their own battery, and only turn on when the power to them is cut. Plugging those into a UPS kind of defeats the purpose.
CAPTCHA: poindexter
Admin
...except they may have taken my residential complex's "logic".
All the emergency lights are actually powered not by a battery, but by the emergency plant.
And guess why I know this: the circuits were overloaded (each phase supplied current to around 20 apartments, and to my dismay, one of those phases supplied my tower's 20 apartments and the 4 elevators for the whole complex (one elevator per tower, though).
Obviously, my tower had frequent blackouts due to the fuses popping. The owner wouldn't listen to us about needing to balance/separate into more phases. He kept only buying bigger and bigger fuseboxes (last one was a big-ass 200-amp breaker); the actual problem to solve is that the complex still doesn't have a substation to distribute power to our apartments.
Finally, and much like this WTF ... one of the watthometers exploded. Yes, exploded. It literally went down in flames, with all the neighbors trying to put it out when I came to the apartment. Geeze, it even looked like something out of the BOFH stories. (Good thing all my computing equipment was offline).
3 days later, the administration resigned, and the new condo admin rebalanced the power lines. Still waiting that substation, though...
So I wouldn't be surprised by battery-less "emergency" lights...
Admin
Oh this is so precious!
Admin
Damn, I just realised - I see this every day and have gotten used to it.
Several months ago, dripping water from an air conditioner into a power supply created pretty sparks, and stuff didn't work so well. So I built an "umbrella" out of a cardboard box and a long plastic stick. It's still there, and will probably be there for years to come.
I feel sad now.
Admin
"Sorry, all out for today. Try tomorrow at noon."
Which noon? We don't all live on the same time zone.
Admin
I did exactly that a while ago. I made a comment about not being first AND something on-topic. Though the forum is bristling with posts like that, mine was deleted.
I guess our moderators act somewhat randomly...
Admin
It's EST. I live on the east coast of the US and it popped up around my noon today.
Admin
Admin
This is worse than funny! The politically correct way, of course, would be to always delete the first post. That way, there would be no first post and no one would be offended.
Admin
There's another WTF buried here: Winston and his colleagues did not speak the right language with management. Saying that there is a technical problem will only get a positive result in very rare cases.
What they should have done, was to tell management that there is a potential problem that will cost the company $AAA if it materializes and it will cost $BBB to correct it - with AAA being much larger than BBB. AAA may be inflated slightly and BBB must be inflated sufficiently such that you still have emough money for solving the problem after management has cut the amount down.
And always, ALWAYS, remember: the ONLY language management knows is money.
Admin
Captcha: Poindexter - Why do I have to get the difficult ones?
Admin
Thats exactly it. You have to talk managemnt the spech of money. If this is not fixed now it willl cost toe company XXX$ per minute if this system fails, etc... :D
Admin
We've not had a full power failure since then so who knows whether the situation was fixed. But the H&S people were very upset about the failure of the emergency lights. Thankfully I work in a different part of the building now, with windows so there's at least some external light.
Admin
I worked for a pensions company in the UK before the my current job and we had a business centre some 200 mules foun our HQ that suffered a network crash in their router every afternoon at 4:30pm which would require a cold boot of the aforementioned router.
At the time I worked on second line support and was tasked with working out what was happening. We knew that the cleaners arrived around then and that the cupboard housing the router also had their vacuum cleaner but the obvious "unplugging" was not happening.
Eventually we worked out that the router was bolted to a shelf behind the door (all cables and buttons facing the wall) and that the cleaner was forcing the door back to get the vacuum cleaner out and hitting the router. This would cause it to slide on its shelf and push it against the wall causing the 3.5" floppy disk to partialy eject. When the router was rebooted what drive would suck the disk back in and everyhting would be alright until the next night.
Knowing that we were scrapping that router in a few weeks time and not having any spanners to hand I got the office manager to snap the eject button off as a temporary fix!
Admin
Admin
Classic stuff! Sounds just about right. "IT costs way too much and we never get anything back!" OK, well next time you want to fulfill all those back orders on a Friday night and Word/Excel ain't working and the DB's ain't available you'll find me in the local boozer, toasting your ability to save another few pence!
I give up trying to get a sticker, so stuff it, I'm gonna buy a pack of labels at Office World and print my own on the company colour printer...and they'll have hookers and blackjack! Forget the stickers!
Admin
Been there, got that tee-shirt.
Worked at one of those global oil companies in a UK computer centre for a while. They spent six months installing a giant Caterpillar genset and literally lorry loads of batteries to keep some IBM 3090s and a pile of VAXen running.
The day of the test came and the senior managers came to watch the mains power being cut...and lo! the Caterpillar did burst in to life and take the load from the batteries and much back-slapping began.
Five minutes later the high temperature alarm inside the computer room activated and cut all power. Have never heard a silence as silent as that ever.
Admin
It seems like most pointy hairs sit on one extreme or the other. One group will spend billions making sure every thing is redundant times ten. They'll throw money at anything they think helps cover their ass. Let's be honest though, if the office burns to a crisp, there's going to be an interruption in service.
Then there's the more common group who will ask what the cost is. Then they ask what the cost to recover is. Then they ask what the chances of a catastrophic shutdown are. If you don't quote 100% chance of failure, they are gambling with company money! You'll be lucky to get a second power cord for the dual power supply servers out of them.
Admin
Back in my college days twenty-odd years ago, I worked for the campus data center. We used mostly CDC mainframes, with a couple of IBMs thrown in. All the Vaxen and whatnot belonged to the compsci people, and were in their own center. One February, some semi-literate genius from facilities notices that the chillers in the building next door are running, so he shuts them off, it being cold out and all that.
You should have heard all the alarms going off in our building when the water-cooled boxes lost pressure and shut themselves down. There was much running about and waving of hands. Since the only major job running at the time that got hosed was campus payroll, no disciplinary action was taken -- other than letting people know the details of why payroll was held up. After that, only a couple of people had keys to the chiller building.
Admin
Crazy, indeed: lots of other posts about stickers exist which were not deleted. So I doubt it was censorship. Software failure? Easily. Should it be fixed? Yes, please! :)
Admin
Sarbanes Oxley got us the proper backups and redundant servers that we'd been saying we needed for two years. Execs go into meeting all smiles, come out kanda pale (parts of SOX are enforced by jail time) and writing checks...
Rich
Admin
A/C failures were common in the Data Center in San Jose because it sometimes gets beastly hot, we had rows and rows of discs (85 F exhaust air) and huge CPU's (exhaust from an 1110's CPU power supply stack was enough to cook lunch in), and the cooling tower was a bad compromise located below ground. And the tower was old and chronically scaled up.
So the PHB (term not invented yet, but the prototype I believe was a peer of the one Adams used--same company) suggested we stock a collection of window-mounted air conditioners to be deployed on chairs around the Data Center when the need arose.
Admin
I agree it's always better to speak to Mgt with that in mind. I call that move "quantifuscation".
Managers also love new buzz words that make NO sense.
captcha = dubya (how appropriate)
Admin
This is the second reason for using the BigRedButton
Admin
Seems line 1202 would have gotten me in for a sticker.
Are they real? And how appropriate--the captcha is "gotcha".
Admin
Sounds familiar. Here in the Netherlands we have the "ARBO-dienst". It is some agency that checks all kinds of rules about safety on the workplace etc.
One day I went to my parents job. About the first thing I noticed when I got into the warehouse were the improvements on the fork-lift. The lights were working again, it had a seatbelt etc -> The "ARBO-dienst" had been there to check everything.
The broken light, non-existent seatbelt and the other issues had been there for a few years. Not that it made working any less safe or anything, but the "ARBO" requires working lights, a seatbelt etc.
The reason nobody ever bothered to fix this was not even management/money-related, the fixes were (or, are) useless. The forklift is used, 6 times a month, 10 seconds per 5 minutes for about two hours, inside a well-lit loading dock. It literally goes up 4 feet and moves forward one feet, to be reversed 5 minutes later and repeated 5 after that.
If I recall correctly that was the only issue they found, so that was pretty good actually.
Totally unrelated: "Erp" is the name of the village I live in. The first time I heard about ERP-software I was quite confused :P
Admin
Back to the power station again (I saw a few WTFs there). We used to boast that we had the biggest backup generator, 1490MW of coal fired turbines, until the day a contractor was doing some work in the switchyard and decided to carefully lockout the main feed to the control room... and the backup feed.
In the control rooms all the lights and panels went dark so the operators hit the emergency trips on the turbines (without control, turbines race until they shed a few blades. You do not want to be in the same building when that happens).
When the lights went out in the office I walked out the door and heard for the first time the sound of a power station winding down. It took 3 days to get back up and lost us around $20M.
Oddly our main UPS in the server room didn't kick in. After the power came back on the Network Manager reset the unit and it blew a capacitor very loudly. That woke us up.
Admin
You must be joking ... in that kind of place ? That sounds like the place where they would call the IT people for anything electrical ... you would know about cams being installed.
Admin
Actually this happened at the company I spent some life with. The server room was going to get air condition finally. Some serious reconstruction took place. During this process, on power line came out from that room (it was still small enough to be fed by just one chord) and was plugged in an ordinary wall socket in our graphics department. A sign placed on top of that indicated severe treatment of any puller.
One morning I came in to find hell bent loose. Customer servers had been down as well as other machines. Somebody had pulled the plug, and it hadn't been the janitor. When they followed the line, they found a cell phone recharger plugged in instead. Complete with the phone. It was not so hard to find out which manager's phone it was.