• AdT (unregistered) in reply to Al
    Al:
    now we have the guy unplugging a server to do the hoovering.

    I'm absolutely willing to believe this based on my own experience: Cleaning company dolt unplugs 6 development PCs including mine because he needs a socket for the vacuum cleaner.

    Basically, this guy comes in, sees the socket to which all the PCs in the room are connected, asks "May I?" and just as we're about to realize what this moron is up to and to shout "NOOOOO!", all of our screens go dark.

  • DH (unregistered) in reply to rsynnott

    Well, if the mutt would start vomitting and spraying diarrhea all over the place the second you insert the chocolate, I think most people would learn quite fast. Since it takes some time for the symptoms to emerge, granny just thinks little twinky got sick. However, she will probably stop feeding the little rat chocolate untill 'he feels better'. But seriously, I can see why it takes people a while to conclude chocolate isn't good for pets without beeing told.

  • Da' Man (unregistered) in reply to Al
    Al:
    worsethanfailure seems to be becomming the place of urban legends rather than true wtfs. First we have the guy switching off the air conditioning to save power and now we have the guy unplugging a server to do the hoovering. It's only a matter of time before we have the 'true' tale of the boss complaining to the supplier that they have installed faulty equipment because the keyboards are all missing the 'any' key ...

    I must say that I find these stories very believable. I've seen many clients or bosses like that. Way too many!

  • DH (unregistered) in reply to rsynnott
    rsynnott:
    nwbrown:
    I think cleaning up the vomit and diarrhea from the initial symptoms is enough to teach most people to not do it a second time.

    You'd think so. And you'd be wrong. Lots of people seem to continually give their dogs chocolate. (Incidentally, I assume that slowly poisoning your pets is an offence; unlicensed LD50 testing, for instance, is illegal here, and licenses are only granted for medical experimentation.)

    Well, if the mutt would start vomitting and spraying diarrhea all over the place the second you insert the chocolate, I think most people would learn quite fast. Since it takes some time for the symptoms to emerge, granny just thinks little twinky got sick. However, she will probably stop feeding the little rat chocolate untill 'he feels better'. But seriously, I can see why it takes people a while to conclude chocolate isn't good for pets without beeing told.

    It just makes more sense with the quote attached...

    Captcha: cognac => yet another pet-poison

  • Da' Man (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Al:
    now we have the guy unplugging a server to do the hoovering.
    (...) Basically, this guy comes in, sees the socket to which all the PCs in the room are connected, asks "May I?" and just as we're about to realize what this moron is up to and to shout "NOOOOO!", all of our screens go dark.

    Hehe, when I had to go to a user to fix something around his (or, preferably, her) computer for which I had to crawl under the table, I usually ask things like:

    "Did your computer crash yet?" and "How about now?" This is a sure way of getting them close to the brink of panic! :-)

  • (cs) in reply to daz.
    daz.:
    Al:
    ..we have the guy unplugging a server to do the hoovering...

    Despite everyone thinking this is an urban legand, i've seen this happen loads. I saw it at my last place of work where the servers were in an office (which 2 staff also used) and at least once a month the cleaner would unplug the server, catch the power cables with the vacuum and pull them out, or bang the UPS which caused the lead to the Unix server to fall out (and yes, the company was too cheap to get the UPS replaced/fixed despite my repeated requests, they'd rather spend that cash on trips to Europe for the MD and his mates).

    In my current job we've got approx 200 locations across the city that are on our LAN. And at least once a day we get a call that a site or department can't connect. It usually turns out that someone's unplugged a switch.

    If there's one thing I've learnt from years of support is that people generally don't think about the consequences of their actions.

    Indeed. Once we got a call from one of our clients, who happens to ran several computer labs, that several of the machines were off. One of the people in the lab (a woman - I don't make the cliches, I just see them) had heard a strange sound when plugging in her laptop to a power outlet. Turns out that instead of going to a lab built specifically for user laptops, she went to the one with all the desktop PCs. Not finding a free power outlet, she unplugged a random cable and plugged in her laptop. What she heard was the sound of a whole row of PCs and their screens turning off. Even our client who's not technically proficient could appreciate the "WTFness" of the situation.

  • Martini (unregistered)

    When I started out at the company where I work, I was sat down in front of a PC that I was to use for development. On the front of the case was a yellow sticky note over the power button that read, "Do NOT turn this machine off, it's the server!".

  • (cs) in reply to DOA

    Count me in as another one who had his fair share of experiences IRL with what some describe as "urban legends". Yes, they happen all the time.

    Most people are simply not aware that they could cause damage. Others are just thoughtless.

  • Bitter Like Quinine (unregistered)

    A small electronics company I worked for once quoted a customer who was coming back (after taking a cheaper previous quote after we warned him it wouldn't work) for the same solution plus £500 for NSITYS.

    When the customer rand and asked what NSITYS were, one of the directors explained that was the charge for "not saying I told you so".

  • (cs) in reply to Draculita
    Draculita:
    Oh no, not at all! It is quite deadly to cats and dogs. Just ask a Vet. Same goes for onions.... bad for them.

    I go with a previous poster that stated that different animals react differently.

    I had a cat that out right craved chocolate. He would fight me for chocolate ice cream, loved hot coco, and even ate the ears off a chocolate easter bunny (the hollow variety) one year. He was an outdoor cat mostly and lived 20 years. Not bad I'd say.

    I currently have a cat that, for some reason, likes chili seeds.

  • (cs) in reply to Falcon
    Falcon:
    Actually, there was an issue down south here recently in which some pet food (actually, not the cheap brand, but the reasonably good stuff) which contained poison that killed several pets.

    Not to mention the whole "Peanut Butter" snafu that occurred beforehand. (Need I mention the brand name?)

    The pet food thing wasn't just in the south, (even if you meant "down south" as "the US as opposed to canada") it was across north america (CTV article) - and the Peanut Butter brand was Peter Pan - like you said, name-brand stuff.

    See here for details on the pet food thing - includes such brands as Iams, ALPO, and Science Diet. Mostly canned stuff.

  • (cs) in reply to ender
    rsynnott:
    Right up until it dies due to being left on all the time accessing its disks, yes. I've worked in a few student startups, with desktops used as (development) servers; they tend to have a very short life expectancy, and towards the end suffer from nasty disk and sometimes memory corruption which damages data.

    At home I've got a custom built server that's been running with no data corruption for 2 1/2 years that's only been off when I've moved or restarted for updates.

    It's a dual Athlon-XP 2400+ (2GHz), custom modified with conductive paint to unlock them to Athlon-MPs, two all-copper heatpipe coolers that have had the corner cut so they both fit, 1.5GB of ECC DDR266 ram, a 20GB IDE boot disk and four 300GB sata disks in raid-5 on a SiI 3114 controller that I flashed to the raid-5 firmware myself, a pci 10/100 ethernet card because using the onboard network socket caused crashes (as does using a gigabit ethernet card unfortunately), a Tagan 480W psu (it can survive a short, I've done it on another pc) and all the case fans installed/replaced with "quiet but good airflow" fans.

    The ECC ram and raid-5 for the disks protects against data corruption, and the decent psu keeps the power stable, so it should last longer than a standard desktop despite being stupidly custom.

    The only downside is that the Athlon XP cpus are HOT compared to real MP cpus, even with copper heatpipe coolers and good airflow the two cpus idle at 60C/65C respectively, rising by up to 10 degrees under heavy load. It issues a warning siren at 72C, and shuts off at 78C. The cpus are rated for at least 85C, so it's within operating spec, but still frighteningly high.

    That said, I'd never use a machine like that in a company environment. Definitely get a pre-built machine with a nice support contract, so you get high-reliability components and a free replacement parts when something dies. And make backups.

  • (cs) in reply to Thief^
    Thief^:
    rsynnott:
    Right up until it dies due to being left on all the time accessing its disks, yes. I've worked in a few student startups, with desktops used as (development) servers; they tend to have a very short life expectancy, and towards the end suffer from nasty disk and sometimes memory corruption which damages data.

    At home I've got a custom built server that's been running with no data corruption for 2 1/2 years that's only been restarted when I've moved or for updates.

    It's a dual Athlon-XP 2400+ (2GHz), custom modified with conductive paint to unlock them to Athlon-MPs, two all-copper heatpipe coolers that have had the corner cut so they both fit, 1.5GB of ECC DDR266 ram, a 20GB IDE boot disk and four 300GB sata disks in raid-5 on a SiI 3114 controller that I flashed to the raid-5 firmware myself, a pci 10/100 ethernet card because using the onboard network socket caused crashes (as does using a gigabit ethernet card unfortunately), a Tagan 480W psu (it can survive a short, I've done it on another pc) and all the case fans installed/replaced with "quiet but good airflow" fans.

    The ECC ram and raid-5 for the disks protects against data corruption, and the decent psu keeps the power stable, so it should last longer than a standard desktop despite being stupidly custom.

    The only downside is that the Athlon XP cpus are HOT compared to real MP cpus, even with copper heatpipe coolers and good airflow the two cpus idle at 60C/65C respectively, rising by up to 10 degrees under heavy load. It issues a warning siren at 72C, and shuts off at 78C. The cpus are rated for at least 85C, so it's within operating spec, but still frighteningly high.

    That said, I'd never use a machine like that in a company environment. Definitely get a pre-built machine with a nice support contract, so you get high-reliability components and a free replacement parts when something dies. And make backups.

    Now you're just bragging :)

  • (cs)

    Another fine example of the axiom: You Get What You Pay For.

    I struggle to help small business owners (clients) understand that.

  • (cs) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    akatherder:
    Sometimes when I go to the store I buy the house-brand peanut butter. One time I bought Hydrox instead of Oreos and my dog died. It USUALLY works out pretty well though.

    People who feed their dogs cocoa should be barred from owning one. Let me break it down to you: Cocoa contains a xanthine (a substance related to caffeine) called theobromine. This is toxic to cats, dogs, horses and all sorts of other mammals.

    And don't even think of feeding your pet with avocado.

    Captcha: tastey (but only once)

    I'm not sure if anyone actually caught my point. Judging by the replies I was too sneaky.

    Just to clarify I didn't feed my dog cocoa or Hydrox or Oreos. Nor did he die. Nor do I even have a dog.

    Sometimes you go cheap and bad things happen. Sometimes you buy expensive stuff and bad things happen. Think of it as a comparison between Linux and Windows. If your boss let's you run a webserver with Linux, it's NOT because he supports open source. He is cheap.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Thief^
    Thief^:
    The only downside is that the Athlon XP cpus are HOT compared to real MP cpus, even with copper heatpipe coolers and good airflow the two cpus idle at 60C/65C respectively, rising by up to 10 degrees under heavy load. It issues a warning siren at 72C, and shuts off at 78C.

    That's why you don't use Athlon XP in servers unless they're for home use only (apart from the fact that they are now obsolete, performance-wise). Opterons or Xeons are faster, run cooler, have a higher temperature safety margin and built-in overheating protection (if your mobo-supplied protection works, I guess that's a lot better than nothing). Since I had a cheap Athlon XP desktop PC that got toasted, I appreciate this. The static from the coolers had attracted a lot of dust, and I didn't notice until the machine crashed, and although being turned off immediately, it wouldn't start up again. As I opened the case to see what's wrong, there was a small amount of CPU ash at the bottom. I am not kidding.

    But I can easiy imagine a PHB saying: Hey, that Sempron box is so much cheaper than this Opteron you wastrel of a techie were talking about. It sounds almost the same, why wouldn't it work the same?

  • (cs) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Thief^:
    The only downside is that the Athlon XP cpus are HOT compared to real MP cpus, even with copper heatpipe coolers and good airflow the two cpus idle at 60C/65C respectively, rising by up to 10 degrees under heavy load. It issues a warning siren at 72C, and shuts off at 78C.

    That's why you don't use Athlon XP in servers unless they're for home use only (apart from the fact that they are now obsolete, performance-wise). Opterons or Xeons are faster, run cooler, have a higher temperature safety margin and built-in overheating protection (if your mobo-supplied protection works, I guess that's a lot better than nothing). Since I had a cheap Athlon XP desktop PC that got toasted, I appreciate this. The static from the coolers had attracted a lot of dust, and I didn't notice until the machine crashed, and although being turned off immediately, it wouldn't start up again. As I opened the case to see what's wrong, there was a small amount of CPU ash at the bottom. I am not kidding.

    I'm not surprised. There was a tom's hardware video floating around the web a while back where they took the CPU fans off CPUs while they were running. Some would slow down, some would hang, other would die. They took the fan off the 1.4 Athlon and the thing virtually went nuclear. With smoke rising out of the cpu within 2 seconds they pointed a laser thermometer at it and it read somewhere around 300+ degrees.

    One of my machines has an athlon and needless to say, I'm very careful with its cooling.

  • (cs) in reply to rsynnott
    rsynnott:
    Right up until it dies due to being left on all the time accessing its disks, yes. I've worked in a few student startups, with desktops used as (development) servers; they tend to have a very short life expectancy, and towards the end suffer from nasty disk and sometimes memory corruption which damages data.

    This is actually something overlooked even by professional IT people. The average PC purchased at Walmart or Best Buy may not be server grade in that its is designed for, or is using parts designed for, a 8x5 duty cycle, not a 24x7 one. Even checking out the MTBF specs of different drives can be an enlightening experience...

    Cooling redundancy (or even just a a higher-quality CPU fan) can go quite a long way when it comes to uptime/lifetime. Geeks that build their own machines seldom go for the cheapest (or lower quality) PSU and cooling fans. And just because our home-built monsters run well 24x7 for years without issue does not mean that a machine with the same RAM and CPU purchased from Best Buy will do the same.

  • (cs)

    Somebody remind me why Jeff even considers Frank a friend?

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    They took the fan off the 1.4 Athlon and the thing virtually went nuclear. With smoke rising out of the cpu within 2 seconds they pointed a laser thermometer at it and it read somewhere around 300+ degrees.

    I wonder whether this is because the die exhibits "negative resistance" with respect to heat. Usually, as a conductor gets hotter, resistance increases and therefore (assuming voltage remains constant), current and therefore power decreases. A light bulb draws more power when it's just been switched on, for example.

    But IIRC in some semiconductors, at a certain temperature, there is a sharp drop in resistance, so there is a current surge, and power (which is U²/R where U is voltage and R is the resistance) increases proportionally, literally frying the material.

    Wikipedia only mentions negative resistance with respect to eletrical fields, but this page (no Yahoo link) notes that light and heat can also cause an increase in the number of free electrons in a semiconductor, meaning lower resistance.

  • NotAnEnglishMajor (unregistered) in reply to TheRubyWarlock
    TheRubyWarlock:
    So by "Frugal fellow" it means "Worthless fucking cheapskate who doesn't want to spend a dime on anything more than he has to, so he can pocket the rest of the money", right? Met far too many of those type of people. It's a wonder how slime like that can be successful and get to be filthy rich.

    Whoa! Have you tried decaf? Maybe try cutting back on the red meat a bit as well...

  • (cs) in reply to NotAnEnglishMajor
    NotAnEnglishMajor:
    TheRubyWarlock:
    So by "Frugal fellow" it means "Worthless fucking cheapskate who doesn't want to spend a dime on anything more than he has to, so he can pocket the rest of the money", right? Met far too many of those type of people. It's a wonder how slime like that can be successful and get to be filthy rich.

    Whoa! Have you tried decaf? Maybe try cutting back on the red meat a bit as well...

    Maybe he's just pissed because his dog drank his yoohoo and now he has to clean up.

  • FIA (unregistered) in reply to Tias
    Tias:
    Caffeine and cocoa are toxic to humans as well, we are probably just a bit more sturdy to that diet - not to mention our larger body mass. Everything is toxic, really.

    Not everything, but most things are if you take enough. (EG, Water, Chocolate.) Annoyingly the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that isn't is Cannabis, which is probably a poor example.

  • (cs) in reply to Gitsnik

    I. Want. That. Footage. Now!

  • stupid old me (unregistered) in reply to nwbrown
    nwbrown:
    AdT:
    akatherder:
    Sometimes when I go to the store I buy the house-brand peanut butter. One time I bought Hydrox instead of Oreos and my dog died. It USUALLY works out pretty well though.

    People who feed their dogs cocoa should be barred from owning one. Let me break it down to you: Cocoa contains a xanthine (a substance related to caffeine) called theobromine. This is toxic to cats, dogs, horses and all sorts of other mammals.

    And don't even think of feeding your pet with avocado.

    Captcha: tastey (but only once)

    I think cleaning up the vomit and diarrhea from the initial symptoms is enough to teach most people to not do it a second time.

    He never actually said he fed the dog the cookies...

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to KattMan

    Just cause they like it don't mean it's good. I had a cat that liked wine.

  • (cs) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    Now you're just bragging :)
    Yup.
    DOA:
    There was a tom's hardware video floating around the web a while back where they took the CPU fans off CPUs while they were running. Some would slow down, some would hang, other would die. They took the fan off the 1.4 Athlon and the thing virtually went nuclear. With smoke rising out of the cpu within 2 seconds they pointed a laser thermometer at it and it read somewhere around 300+ degrees.

    One of my machines has an athlon and needless to say, I'm very careful with its cooling.

    I've seen that video.

    You should have seen my server before I got copper coolers...

    Addendum (2007-07-13 13:00): You should also have seen what happened when the "stable power" add-in board fell out of my gigabyte socket 939 motherboard. Flames, popped chips, and a nice "crack" as the psu trips to prevent any further damage. I lost my cpu and graphics card (and obviously the mobo) and I'll never buy gigabyte again. The cpu and gfx card were using the power from this board when it died (and its death throes killed them), but my tagan 480W psu tripping likely saved the rest of my pc.

    Though it did give me an excuse to upgrade. And that's one of several (unfortunately) examples where my tagan 480W psu has survived electrically dangerous situations, and probably saved large parts of my pc in the process. Unlike the qtec 450W and 550W I had at one point...

    Maybe I'm not safe around PCs.

  • Flipside (unregistered) in reply to Falcon
    Falcon:

    Actually, there was an issue down south here recently in which some pet food (actually, not the cheap brand, but the reasonably good stuff) which contained poison that killed several pets.

    Not to mention the whole "Peanut Butter" snafu that occurred beforehand. (Need I mention the brand name?)

    I am one of the cheapskates that buy's the store brand of many things; including pet food. I usually find it is no less different than the overpriced alternatives; with the exception that neither I nor my pets have been poisoned.

    That wasn't just "down south" - it was across all of North America at least. Regarding store brands, it's pretty easy to do some online research and read ingredient labels. Kirkland food from Costco, for example, is made by Diamond Petfoods and is nutritionally superior to much more expensive brands such as Eukanuba and Science Diet. One of my dogs has allergies so I spent a lot of time researching this; feel free to do so on your own however...

  • Sgt. Preston (unregistered) in reply to Stingray
    Stingray:
    Any respectable data center will have monitoring in place, and if the temperature rises above norm for any reason (chiller failure, fire, janitor trips over the power cord,
    ...spilled beer,...
  • Rollerballsmil (unregistered) in reply to nwbrown

    Er, we had a contract cleaning person unplug our Sun file-server. The cleaning person had, shall we say, limited intelligence. You can probably say the same for our IT support person, as the server was sitting in an otherwise unused cubicle. Our system was down for a day and a half.

  • PotatoEngineer (unregistered) in reply to FIA
    FIA:
    Not everything, but most things are if you take enough. (EG, Water, Chocolate.) Annoyingly the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that isn't is Cannabis, which is probably a poor example.
    No, really, everything is eventually poisonous, should you really take that much of it. It's just that with cannabis, the "pass out" dosage is much, much lower than the "die" dosage, and most people don't even take enough cannabis to pass out. (Something along the lines of "smoke a telephone pole of it".) You'll die of smoke inhalation before you die of THC overdose, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to die of THC.
  • James (unregistered)

    RE: all the dog-and-cat toxic substances stuff, they have a very different renal system from that of a human.

    I figured in case this page comes up on a search engine or something I should mention something I found out about recently (Snopes or Straight Dope, forget which): the artificial sweetener in most breath mints and almost all sugar-free gum is highly toxic to dogs. Most people know about chocolate; some know about grape seeds (and therefore some raisins), or onions (?), or alcohol (!!!), but few know about xylitol. Humans don't raise their blood insulin in response to xylitol, which tastes sweet but does not provide significant calories, but dogs' digestive systems get fooled into producing a massive insulin spike, which can kill them.

    I know it's very far off topic, but I thought if even one person sees this here and keeps their dog from accidentally getting into their mint supply, it's worth posting.

  • (cs) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    People who feed their dogs cocoa should be barred from owning one. Let me break it down to you: Cocoa contains a xanthine (a substance related to caffeine) called theobromine. This is toxic to cats, dogs, horses and all sorts of other mammals.

    And don't even think of feeding your pet with avocado.

    Of course if you google "avocado dog cat food" you'll get dozens of links that say they're just fine. Even commercial dog/cat foods that contain avocado like this one: avoderm (an no, I don't that product. I just found it on Google)

    Chocolate being bad for dogs is more well known, but still it's a tricky thing. A few years back our dog got into a whole bag of chocolate during the holidays. He probably ate a pound and a half of milk chocolate, (and a good number of little foil wrappers too!) and he never had any visible ill effects.....

    Would I feed my dog chocolate on purpose? Hell no, why would I waste my chocolate on the dog! But if your dog snarfs a dropped s'more I wouldn't drop everything and run to the vet either.... An, as with most things dog, size matters. What a Great Dane would tolerate, might hurt a Lab. What a Lab might tolerate would probably hurt a Chihuahua. Of course breathing hard might hurt a Chihuahua.... ;)

    -Me

  • mjc (unregistered) in reply to KattMan

    We had a dog that got into and ate a whole box of chocolate candies - even though they were wrapped! We were really worried, but I took her on a walk and, though she was sick and wobbly, she got through it fine. Whew!

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to stupid old me
    stupid old me:
    He never actually said he *fed* the dog the cookies...

    Yes, but that's a plausible interpretation for "One time I bought Hydrox instead of Oreos and my dog died."

    Actually, I think it's the only plausible interpretation under the assumption that the second part of the sentence actually has anything to do with the first. akatherder clarified on this, however, the two parts of the sentence really don't have anything to do with each other.

    FIA:
    Not everything, but most things are if you take enough. (EG, Water, Chocolate.) Annoyingly the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that isn't is Cannabis, which is probably a poor example.

    If you'd have 200ml of Cannabis juice intravenously, you'd probably suffer some symptoms, too...

  • (cs) in reply to Thief^
    Thief^:
    Addendum (2007-07-13 13:00): You should also have seen what happened when the "stable power" add-in board fell out of my gigabyte socket 939 motherboard. Flames, popped chips, and a nice "crack" as the psu trips to prevent any further damage. I lost my cpu and graphics card (and obviously the mobo) and I'll never buy gigabyte again. The cpu and gfx card were using the power from this board when it died (and its death throes killed them), but my tagan 480W psu tripping likely saved the rest of my pc.

    That's because you didn't use the mounting bracket. If you properly affixed that, there's no way it could fall off. Giga-Byte actually happens to make some of the highest quality consumer-grade motherboards on the planet. It's no small wonder that ASUS (a geek favorite because they tend to be factory-overdriven) actually licenses a lot from them (and, last I saw, had a co-manufacturing agreement with them).

    ASUS parts tend to be running about 1-3MHz faster than they tell you they are, which can lead to issues down the road if you have a sorry power supply - hence the reason a lot of white box computers die.

    Thief^:
    Maybe I'm not safe around PCs.
    Ya think? ;)

    Addendum (2007-07-13 21:40): Strike "no small wonder" and replace it with "no wonder"

    Completely different meanings there...

  • (cs)

    And to clarify something big here: Water is not poisonous, by strict definition.

    Water just has the annoying capability of making your cells burst under their own internal pressure, if you consume enough pure water to reduce the alkalinity of your blood to a very low level.

    If you drank ten gallons of tap water (if you were even capable of it), it likely would not harm you, because tap water in most locales has enough random mineral hardness to keep your cells from happily sucking it up until they die of aqueous gluttony.

    If you drink a decent amount of distilled water, though, you very well could suffer various ill effects, possibly including death, from the unstable situation created when you put pure water on one side of an osmotic membrane and everything but pure water on the other side - when that membrane isn't elastic enough to handle it.

  • turning thirty. (unregistered) in reply to Jimbo
    Jimbo:
    I've run into these people before. It never pays to hang around for very long.

    They'll always be too cheep to do things the right way till it bites them in the ass. And they will never ever learn.

    Too right. And then - it's your fault and you end up working your ass off just to get things up and running again.

    It's enough to go postal.

  • Benjamin Franz (unregistered)

    For those who think no one would actually turn off the A/C in a room full of expensive electronics and that the whole story must be an urban legend, think again. Stuff like that really does happen. Let's not talk of 'FoF'. This is personal experience.

    When I was in the US Navy as an Electronics Technician (1987-1993) I was responsible for essentially all the radio related equipment onboard my ship. As in a number of computers, transmitters and receivers and other misclleneous gear for everything from HF to satellite circuits. Probably some millions of dollars worth of equipment (much of which could have been replaced with civilian gear that worked better, was more reliable, weighed less, and was a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper - but that is a different story).

    The radio room on a ship is, of course, heavily air conditioned for the sake of the gear. Turned on, the air temp in the 'back room' was about a stable 56 degrees. In the 'front' area, 65 or so.

    Except that the radiomen hated the cold - and kept turning off the A/C. It then typically warmed up to perhaps eighty or so (they were mostly from the South, and liked it quite toasty).

    I had repeated battles with them about it ("Oh? Is it off? I don't know how that could have happened...") until I came up with the solution of threatening to write the senior man present up if I came up there and the A/C was off again. I didn't care who turned it off: He would get the write-up.

    They didn't like me for that. But the A/C stayed on.

    It was one of several battles that I had to fight when I got there.

    Another was requiring the ship's engineers to give the electronics spaces advance warning (so we could turn off gear) when they were going to do power interrupting emergency drills rather than just pulling the switch and blacking out the entire ship abruptly.

    By the time I left the ship four years later, the MTBF for the least reliable electronics gear I was responsible for had improved by literally almost two orders of magnitude (from a few days to several months).

  • Adrian Wilkins (unregistered)

    There is a WTF there though - drills are there for a reason. If your supposedly military-grade hardware can't survive an unplanned power loss, the solution is to install gear that can, not to ask nicely for advanced warning of what should be a realistic piece of training.

    In time of war, the enemy is not going to tell you in advance that he's going to knock your power out.

  • Benjamin Franz (unregistered) in reply to Adrian Wilkins

    The drills were for the engineers not the electronics people (we had our own drills that were managed completely seperately). And being 'military-grade' doesn't mean that a power surge isn't going to blow circuits.

    If REALISM was the only goal, we would have lit actual fires on the ship for the daily fire drills and actually jumped overboard for abandon ship drills.

    There are, however, competing goals, (such as not actually destroying the ship just for a drill).

    ;)

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Al
    Al:
    worsethanfailure seems to be becomming the place of urban legends rather than true wtfs. First we have the guy switching off the air conditioning to save power and now we have the guy unplugging a server to do the hoovering. It's only a matter of time before we have the 'true' tale of the boss complaining to the supplier that they have installed faulty equipment because the keyboards are all missing the 'any' key ...

    This stuff actually happens, just because it is unlikely doesn't mean it's an urban legend.

    When I worked for a major cable ISP we had an instance where an entire UBR went offline, one that serviced 20,000 customers. I was working the monitoring desk that day and the resolution that was reported is that a cleaning crew unplugged the power in order to vacuum.

  • (cs) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    Another fine example of the axiom: You Get What You Pay For.

    I struggle to help small business owners (clients) understand that.

    Precisely. You can spend as little as possible on the equipment, and it will do the job a few times, then die on you.

    If you spend enough money, it will do the job, then continue doing the job until you die.

  • Tony (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    And don't even think of feeding your pet with avocado.

    I had to google this and the first hit says you're right... the second link advocates avocados in recipes! WTF.

    http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=dog+avocado&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

  • rycamor (unregistered)

    Yes, this pattern is more common than many of you know. Up until last year, the owner of a small but successful communications company hosted his website and several others' on a Windows server sitting under his desk. Since that machine was so conviently located, and since he didn't want his regular company desktop to crash so often, he used the server to track his stocks at E-trade and other companies, leaving several windows of Java widgets with stock tickers open 24/7. Usually, their website was painfully slow, even though they had very light visitor traffic.

    When I was called in to add realtime mapping capabilities to his website (long story) I explained that I needed a separate server running FreeBSD to handle PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and Mapserver. What I got was a mini tower Celeron 700 slapped together by cannibalizing other desktops, which also sat under the boss's desk, BUT on the other side, which was actually a busy passageway where people walked and thus the machine was constantly getting kicked, cable disconnected, etc... Why did he place it there? There were no other sockets to route it to the same network as the server.

  • The Monster (unregistered)

    "the place of urban legends"

    I don't know about the original story, but this is definitely not an urban legend:

    I do tech support work for a living. One Tuesday morning, we got a call from a site where "everybody's down". I asked if the server was working, and it was, which led me to suspect a network problem. So I asked the customer to locate the hub/switch ("It's a box with a bunch of wires plugged into it that look like phone plugs, only fatter"). Once it was found, I asked what lights were lit up. None. Its brick was unplugged from the AC. ("Follow the wire that does NOT look like a fat phone plug. Where does it go?") Plug it in, and everything's hunky if not dory.

    Next Tuesday, the same site called in, and the call was referred to me as the person who had fixed a similar problem the week before. Remembering that the switch had been unplugged, I directed the customer back to the same place. Again it was unplugged. Plugging it in again resolved the problem.

    The third consecutive Tuesday morning, they called in with the same problem. I mentioned to the customer that it had officially become a 'pattern'. She said "You know, we have a cleaning crew in here on Monday nights... I wonder if they're unplugging this thing so they can plug in a vacuum cleaner." I suggested she have a chat with the cleaning people.

    The next Tuesday, they did not call in. I do not know whether the cleaners left the switch plugged in, remembered to plug it back in after unplugging the vacuum, or our customer just plugged the damn thing in without calling us.

  • Packrat (unregistered)

    Morons who habitually pull the plug on equipment are a very good reason to put power connections inside a locked cabinet.

  • DavidTC (unregistered) in reply to The Monster

    The thing that gets me about the 'cleaning crew unplugging the router' is...okay, let's look at this logically. Let's pretend we're ignorant and don't understand that randomly unplugging and plugging computer equipment is bad. Let's pretend we think it's like, say, a lamp.

    So we go to clean, and we unplug their lamp to do so. Then we...leave it unplugged? WTF? So when they come in the next morning, they think their light bulb is burned out and spend ten minutes trying to fix it?

    I can buy that people who have absolutely no experience with computers, and certainly no experience with servers and routers, might not realize they are on and working 24 hours a day, and think unplugging something for a short amount of time has no effect at all.

    But leaving things unplugged...hell, that's not acceptable no matter what the thing is. You can't wander around in someone else's space leaving things unplugged.

    The 'Server mysteriously has downtime or building loses connectivity every night because cleaning crew borrows the plugs' story is understandable through ignorance, and that cleaning crew needs educating, but the 'leaving things unplugged' story is just insane, and that crew needs firing. Who knows what else sort of stupid behavior they're doing...maybe they're taking out safety shields on the factory floor and not putting them back either.

  • James (unregistered) in reply to Al

    urban legends rather than true wtfs. First we have the guy switching off the air conditioning to save power and now we have the guy unplugging a server to do the hoovering.

    Urban legends my ass. I've seen similar idiocy with my own two eyes. One place I worked had more of this WTF-ery than pretty much all other places I've worked put together. Here's a quick list of what I encountered the first week:

    1. half the production servers for a million hit per day website are located in a hallway, stacked on top of each other. Most are recycled desktops

    2. the other half are in the server "room" (which has no door) and are lying on the floor since there's no racks or even tables.

    3. The main database server? Why that's in the CEO's office. It's a big cube case, so naturally it's covered with a glass tabletop and a tablecloth, with a large potted plant on it.

    4. UPSs? What do we need UPSs for?

    5. Alarm on Saturday AM of the first week. All of the production servers in that hallway died at the same time? Drive down there. Get told "not to worry, it was just the breaker popping again". Again? What the hell do you mean "again"? Oooh. The CLEANING LADY PLUGGED IN HER VACUUM AND TOOK THEM DOWN - AGAIN!? This happens EVERY WEEK?!?!!!

    6. Web servers keep freezing due to bad code and load. Should we fix the code, buy more boxes, spread things out a bit? Hell no! Let's just hire some students for a few bucks an hour. Their "job" is to do their homework in front of a monitor that refreshes a page from each of the webservers once every 90 seconds. They glance at the monitor as they do their schoolwork/studies and if one of the browser windows freezes, they note which server that corresponds to, and go over and power cycle it! Problem solved!!!!

    So yeah, urban legends. I friggin' wish. I would have gotten a lot less grey hair during my tenure there if such things were only urban legends.

  • Al (unregistered)

    Very interesting article. You need to check this web site, itoldyouso.com It will fit nicely.

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