• (cs) in reply to Erik
    Erik:
    The idea that that many critical servers would not have some sort of capability to signal someone if they failed is ludicrous.

    I hope you meant "ludicrous, but happens all the time anyway".

    Last place I worked (a very small software development company) the hard disk containing the CVS repository of all the source code crashed unrecoverably . . . and there was no backup at all. The only thing that saved them was that someone had created a fresh tree a few days earlier. Absolutely true.

  • T (unregistered) in reply to Otter

    I was going to say, this is at least the second time i've seen it on WTF with just a different name.

  • (cs) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    If the story were actually true, the Real WTF would be that in a server room stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars there is no temperature sensor that can trigger an automatic shutdown and service personnel alerts.

    Auto-shutdown can bite you in the ass too. Let me tell you of a cavalcade of WTF's at one of my summer internships: First, the servers were in a room with water sprinklers. Big WTF right there. But it's OK because the servers would auto-shutdown if the sprinklers were going off. Certainly minimizes the damage that way.

    One night they performed a mandatory test of the first alarms. Thankfully somebody had the foresight to make sure the sprinklers were turned off, to keep the whole building from getting soaked. But they forgot to disable the mechanism that tells the servers the sprinklers are on....

    As we all know, the best time to do fire alarm tests like that is 3AM on a Wednesday. It's the time people are least likely to be bothered by it. Conveniently enough (and for mostly the same reasons), 3AM on a Wednesday is also the best time to backup a week worth of data.

    So mid-backup the fire alarm test goes off and tells the servers that the sprinklers are on, so they shut down. The one server that has all our maintenance records (for gas pipelines, so yeah that stuff's important...not to mention federally regulated) was completely toast.

    Thursday was pretty busy for the rest of the office, but interns like me got a nice break.

  • Simmo (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    xix:

    People should pass little intelligence tests before having access to keys to such places though.

    Remember, this is a state agency. These are Government employees. It would be a violation of (some sort of) civil rights to test intelligence; as would be the case with competence. {And, probably, cause a Union hubub too}

    My we're on a real right-wing blast today aren't we.

    We used to have a Technical Services manager who was nicknamed 'Yee-hah!'. This was because he had some funny habits, like walking in to the server room to borrow an extension lead, pointing to a power plug in its socket, saying 'this one isn't being used is it?', yanking it out... and zilching the main development server as a result... We only lost a week's worth of code changes, that's all

  • (cs) in reply to Doug
    Doug:
    Whoever turned off the A/C should have just offset the energy usage by planting a few Eucalyptus trees in Uganda.
    Why do that when you can buy indulgences^W carbon credits from Al Gore?
  • Will (unregistered)

    HOLY LOL!

  • (cs) in reply to Pap
    Pap:
    http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/122464.aspx

    Dupe!!

    CAPTCHA: False Associationism -- how appropriate! :)

    The Side Bar WTF says 90˚ Fahrenheit. The article above says 109˚. I think someone got a bit creative there...

  • (cs)

    Fine, Urban Legend, okay, but this is supposed to be a state department? I've worked in government long enough to know that there is always, always someone in. Whether it's a three-day weekend, or the sky has gone dark from that massive incoming meteor blocking the sun, there is always someone working and that means there is always someone in IT. And I work in quite a small local authority. It's like one of those jokes that people tell as though it happened to a friend of theirs in an attempt to make it funnier. How many times do you want to tear the head off your colleagues for sending you the same damned hoax email they forwarded to you 5 years ago?

    By the way, you should know that Bill Gates has teamed up with Google, AOL and NASA, and he's giving away a substantial part of his fortune. They want to track email usage so for every person you forward this to, he'll give you $10!! (my friend works in IT and this CAN be done!!1!one)

  • Rhialto (unregistered) in reply to anne
    anne:
    A liberal did a dumb thing. Therefore, all liberals are dumb.

    Nice logic there. I hope you're not programming anything important.

    And how is trying to conserve energy (by itself a laudable goad, albeit a bit misguided in this case) being "a liberal"? And why does that seem to be "wrong"?

  • mikko (unregistered) in reply to T$
    T$:
    Erik:
    The idea that that many critical servers would not have some sort of capability to signal someone if they failed is ludicrous. Is the IT team totally dependent on user complaints to find out when a server goes down during working hours?

    This is a really good point, at the least there should be some sort of automated email system for the temperature of the room, I couldn't imagine the cost being all that high.

    The bigger issue as I see it is either: a) ----- should have access to the room. If this is the case, why did you hire someone that would make that big of a mistake so easily to do a job where they'd need that kind of access? b) ----- should NOT have access to the room. In this case, why is there no lock on the server room door to keep such people out?

    Obviously, you have never worked in academia-land - ALL Phds know more than the tech people. If you don't believe it, just ask them. While I was sysadmin on a supercomputing project, I was told (by a Phd, of course) that only a Phd could understand and work with a Unix box... too bad I didn't have any degrees, and I just made it work...

  • Confluence (unregistered)

    A google search for "a little more conscientious of our energy usage" turns up a number of places where an earlier version of this (which I saw on the livejournal community) is reproduced.

    Notably, in the "original" story (I'm skeptical) this is a company, not a government agency, and the temperature doesn't actually get very high before someone notices and the crisis is averted. I guess that wasn't exciting enough.

  • Jerome (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    whicker:
    No, I know you people just purchase whatever is available, and have little if any say in the parts that go into the equipment. But by now, things have got to be perfected to the point where you can add a server farm to your shopping cart and have it arrive next day.

    It also depends what vendor. If you order a Sun server with 4 GB of memory and add 4GB more, they put it in another cardboard box and ship it along with the server.

    OMG, they ship it along with the server? That's service for you!

    If you'd ordered it from HP, they would have sent the memory along separately from the server, and it wouldn't arrive until three months later. When you rang them up to complain, they would have told you they don't sell that sort of memory in the first place.

    In my experience.

  • TheRealFoo (unregistered)

    I imagine his early retirement looked somewhat like this: [image]

  • (cs) in reply to Confluence
    Confluence:
    A google search for "a little more conscientious of our energy usage" turns up a number of places where an earlier version of this (which I saw on the livejournal community) is reproduced.

    Notably, in the "original" story (I'm skeptical) this is a company, not a government agency, and the temperature doesn't actually get very high before someone notices and the crisis is averted. I guess that wasn't exciting enough.

    OMG! The Daily WTF (or whatever this site wants to call itself these days) changes stories before posting them! Who would have thought?

  • (cs) in reply to Bart B
    Bart B:
    I really wonder when people don't stop and think "someone must have come up with a solution for this?". You know how 'much' server monitoring costs? NOTHING! It's called Free and Open Source Software, in this case, the excellent Nagios.

    It may be free, but it ain't excellent. I'll pick "Keep it simple stupid" any day of the week, but Nagios is way too simple and the configuration was way to messy.

    Here is a paraphrased conversation I had with a British fellow who helped us set ours up (smart guy).

    Me: How do we know if the Nagios server goes down and stops notifying us that servers are going down? Guy: Configure another Nagios server in another location to monitor this server. Me: Since my boss is going to ask me the same question... what if they both go down at the same time? Guy: You'll be right fucked then.

  • powerguy (unregistered)

    This is fake as it would not happen on most systems. hp/sun/ibm/emc/stk all have thermal shutdown on their servers and storage and have had for many years. Unless they are buying supermicros or dell there was no chance. Also the email would have gotten out if they had a redundant (n+1) AC setup as the room would have had suffeceint cooling in the room and the systems should not have overheated for at least a couple of hours. Fake but funny.

  • goldfish (unregistered)

    Is this The State newspaper in Columbia, SC?

  • (cs) in reply to powerguy
    powerguy:
    Also the email would have gotten out if they had a redundant (n+1) AC setup as the room would have had suffeceint cooling in the room

    So how does a redundant system help if someone turns off ALL of the units at once? if it's (n+1), and, as in the article there were three, that means n=2, which means if you turn all three off you have 0=(n-2).

  • (cs) in reply to Bubba
    Bubba:
    Of course, that cost money. The way I've seen governments work (thru colleges) is that if you can't directly attribute a cost of something to a project, it doesn't happen. So, it wouldn't surprise me if there were no resources for monitoring, as there would be no budget for it.

    You include it into a "software upgrade" or "hardware maintence" bill. Or, if you are feeling inspired, into a "office cleanning" bill. Whatever.

    Of course, that will only happen if you are granted the money. Since the amount you get isn't related with the amount you need, you also spend it on ways not related to what program it goes into. It is quite simple...

  • mofinator (unregistered)

    Funny, but made up. We don't need more things to clutter our email.

  • Timothy Baldridge (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    I vote for a fake. I don't doubt that one day an idiot would get up and do something totally stupid like turning off the AC in a server room. Well, actually, I believe that every day, an idiot gets up and does somthing that stupid.

    But the e-mail - I don't believe it. Not only does this guy steal a key to get unauthorized access to the server room, in order to switch off the AC without authorization, but then he boasts about it on the company mailing list? And chastizes his coworkers for leaving the ACs running?

    And the most suspicious thing: He destroys $200k worth of equipment and they merely lay him off instead of also suing the sh** out of him?

    Then someone pointed out that similar but not pin-pointable versions of this story have been circulating for a while - this is very common for urban legends. I think this is the Republican version of the "Bush holds children's book upside down" or "Bush forgets to take caps off binoculars" legends, fabricated to make fun of $POLITICAL_OPPONENT, in this case "liberal tree huggers", obviously.

    If the story were actually true, the Real WTF would be that in a server room stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars there is no temperature sensor that can trigger an automatic shutdown and service personnel alerts.

    I don't know, I was in a company a while back where I wouldn't have put it past the leadership to pull something like that. At least most of them knew enough to call us (the IT guys) before doing anything that could possibly in anyway affect the servers. And was probably only because my boss could be a real pain in the neck if you crossed him (which made him great for dealing with said leadership btw).

    CAPTCHA: darwin (The should have been using Macs).

  • ASDF (unregistered) in reply to quad
    quad:
    or by saving us all the trouble and just killing themselves thereby reducing all further things they could have possibly done to hurt the earth.

    save a tree, kill a hippie

    Or kill yourself, since you probably impact nature more than a hippie. Or kill lots of normal people. Gosh.

    (captcha: muhahaha, how appropriate)

  • John McHugh (unregistered) in reply to xix

    What a TIT!!

    Just a thought - I wonder what the carbon footprint was due to the vast amounts of adrenalin and sweat the techies expended - versus the juice saved from downing the A/C?

    Keep non techies away from the Kit!!

  • SomeCoolGuy (unregistered) in reply to xix

    Oh this had better be a joke. If that was my server room the guy had initiated a meltdown in, he would be facing more than just early retirement.

    I feel for that IT group, had sh*t like that or similar happen on too many occasions.

  • SomeCoolGuy (unregistered) in reply to Bart B
    Bart B:
    redbeard:
    Could be. Considering I'm a part time admin with no pager and no cell phone and no way to tap into the phone system anyway, I don't have anything like this.

    There are four other people actively involved with our servers, two of whom do it full time. A few weeks back a water leak blew up the main power distribution panel feeding the server room. That caused the generator to kick on. Everything at that point was fine, but no one was notified. Then, at about 2 a.m., a hose blew off the generator, which promptly shut down. Again, no notifications went out. One of the full time IT people got a call as he got out of the shower at 7:30, "Hey, did you know everything is down?"

    So, yes, the IT team could be totally dependant on user complaints. That sort of thing costs money. And if it's a little too much, it doesn't get added.

    I really wonder when people don't stop and think "someone must have come up with a solution for this?". You know how 'much' server monitoring costs? NOTHING! It's called Free and Open Source Software, in this case, the excellent Nagios.

    And Nagios would have had what to say about servers that were humming along nicely, being supplied with full power? Most buildings I've worked at don't provide tenants with access to their SNMP traffic, but even if they did, what would have sent the trap if the thing providing all the power to the building was dead? Now, if there's a UPS between the generator and the servers (like there should be), I just can't think of any reason you wouldn't spend the $1K max that a network module would cost to tell you that your servers are running down the batteries. :)

  • ChrisH (unregistered)

    Blimey! Is this what liberals do in the US?

    I'm glad I'm in the real world. Here we have Right wing, Left wing and the Centre.

    The Right wing wouldn't have air conditioning as it would cost too much.

    The Left wing would be lobbied by the unions to ensure they employed 1000 poeple to blow on the servers.

    The Centre (Liberals) would get some AC and manage it properly.

    At least, that's the real world in my head.. and I'm sticking to it.

  • Will (unregistered)

    This is why we don't let our programmers near Critical Hardware

  • Guido (unregistered)

    the server room was a sweltering 109° Fahrenheit They should have used the metric system

  • (cs)

    I just read this in another column within the last month.

    I call PLAGIARISM. The other story didn't embellish with the whole state agency thing.

    It's on DIGG under "If Computers Have Cooling Fans do you need A/C in Server Rooms?"

    And here's a version that reports it as "I checked email before I came in" - no mention of a state IT dept. http://worldsmostuseless.blogspot.com/2007/05/more-it-idiots.html

    I'm sure I saw it somewhere else (here, on Sharktank, or Clientcopia)

    In the name of integrity, I call upon Alex to remove this. From this point forward, all postings will be suspect for BS in my eyes.

  • Sgt. Preston (unregistered) in reply to Ben4jammin
    Ben4jammin:
    With all the power that all those big computers in that room use Gee...I wonder what is causing all the heat that is making these AC units run constantly I doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same time. I'm a liberal! I'm smucking fart! And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C for the building in that room? I need to point this out for all the dumb power-hungry conservatives in our IT dept In the future, let's try to be a little more conscientious of our energy usage! I just saved $4 dollars' worth of electricity and it only cost us about 200 grand in equipment!

    No, dill-hole, you didn't make Mother Earth smile...

    Conservative, liberal, male, female, left-handed, right-handed, boxers, briefs,... What has any of this to do with someone turning off air conditioners without understanding why they were on?
  • (cs) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    And the most suspicious thing: He destroys $200k worth of equipment and they merely lay him off instead of also suing the sh** out of him?

    I totally believe this. Depending on the jurisdiction, it can be incredibly/stupidly difficult to get rid of someone with cause. Since he can claim that he was acting (in his mind) with the best interests of the company in mind, they're not likely to recoup enough money to matter.

    Also, I read "early retirement" as "he left before the investigation was complete and they could fire him".

  • Ben4jammin (unregistered) in reply to Sgt. Preston
    Sgt. Preston:
    Ben4jammin:
    With all the power that all those big computers in that room use Gee...I wonder what is causing all the heat that is making these AC units run constantly I doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same time. I'm a liberal! I'm smucking fart! And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C for the building in that room? I need to point this out for all the dumb power-hungry conservatives in our IT dept In the future, let's try to be a little more conscientious of our energy usage! I just saved $4 dollars' worth of electricity and it only cost us about 200 grand in equipment!

    No, dill-hole, you didn't make Mother Earth smile...

    Conservative, liberal, male, female, left-handed, right-handed, boxers, briefs,... What has any of this to do with someone turning off air conditioners without understanding why they were on?

    It has nothing to do with it...that's where the humor comes in. You start at one point, and go off on a tangent that doesn't have any logical sequence from the starting point. That's why I started with "gee wonder where the heat is coming from" which is the only relevant part, and went from there. It's all in fun. Like when someone quoted my post and added, "Lighten up, Frances". That has nothing to do with what we were talking about, but it's a damn funny movie quote. As it has been suggested by other posts, this probably didn't really happen, or didn't happen the way it was presented here. So lighten up and have fun with it. The logical world will be there when you get back.

  • rast (unregistered) in reply to Simmo
    Simmo:
    ParkinT:
    xix:

    People should pass little intelligence tests before having access to keys to such places though.

    Remember, this is a state agency. These are Government employees. It would be a violation of (some sort of) civil rights to test intelligence; as would be the case with competence. {And, probably, cause a Union hubub too}
    My we're on a real right-wing blast today aren't we.
    Griggs

  • pinball (unregistered) in reply to PyroTyger
    PyroTyger:
    Fine, Urban Legend, okay, but this is supposed to be a *state* department? I've worked in government long enough to know that there is always, *always* someone in.
    You must work for a different government. My sister works for the government as *the* IT department (yes, she is the only IT person in the whole office). I can affirm that you are wrong in that when she goes on vacation, has a 3-day weekend, leaves for the day or whatever, there is not somebody there to watch over the stuff.
  • Red-neckier than thou (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    T$:
    b) ----- should NOT have access to the room. In this case, why is there no lock on the server room door to keep such people out?
    Read the letter again: it WAS locked, but ----- went and stole the key from [the facility manager’s] desk. This is why I say [the facility manager] should be fired, leaving a key where an unauthorized person can access it is worse than turning off 3 AC's.

    I say: fire 'em both and let God sort 'em out!

  • Anthony (unregistered)

    This is obviously fake.

    First off, and the most obvious, would be the fact that a key is lying aroun for anyone to obtain. The same key that would allow anyone to access confidential information regarding an entire states tax collection and other commerce data. I find this hard to believe, and it this did happen someone would have a field day suing the state for inability to maintain confidentiality. Nothing any state wants to deal with, and it's employees would not publicly post their own failure to maintain. Not to mention the confidentiality agreements, either written or implied, regarding a states computer network. Can we say terminiation?

    A 109 degree computer room? Must have been a small assortment of equipment. Most computer equipment can take temps much higher than that, although improperly vented racks can get hotter inside. Call it poor planning on the data center design for not putting heat sensors in with their tertiary A/C, and network/system admin's fault for not having a simple alerting system in place. Hell a majority of servers come with some type of temp/system monitoring software, idiots if they weren't using it.

    Got what they deserved for building a half-baked data center for an entire states tax collection purposes. Had the story been factual, you can guess who paid for the restoration.....the taxpayers.

  • (cs) in reply to redbeard
    redbeard:
    So, yes, the IT team could be totally dependant on user complaints. That sort of thing costs money. And if it's a little too much, it doesn't get added.

    You could at least write a script which runs on each machine and pings all the other machines every minute...sends an email/text message/whatever when a server disappears.

    Put at least one server on a UPS (they're not that expensive!) so that if the power supply fails all of them simultaneously, there is still one alive to send the SOS. If you can't afford a UPS, then use a laptop.

    But honestly, you could afford a generator, but you couldn't afford to page somebody?

  • (cs) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Me: How do we know if the Nagios server goes down and stops notifying us that servers are going down? Guy: Configure another Nagios server in another location to monitor this server. Me: Since my boss is going to ask me the same question... what if they both go down at the same time? Guy: You'll be right fucked then.

    Haha, what did you expect him to say?

    Guy: Well, actually, angels watch over the Nagios server, so if it does go down, not only will they magically resurrect it, but you'll also be blessed with consciousness on your death bed. You: So I've got that going for me.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Confluence
    Rhialto:
    And how is trying to conserve energy (by itself a laudable goad, albeit a bit misguided in this case) being "a liberal"? And why does that seem to be "wrong"

    Bcos the Bible sez we hafta take the Earth and rape it, it's ours.

    You never listen to Ann Coulter?

    Confluence:
    Notably, in the "original" story (I'm skeptical) this is a company, not a government agency, and the temperature doesn't actually get very high before someone notices and the crisis is averted. I guess that wasn't exciting enough.

    You'll have to agree that a government agency is a much better choice than a privately-owned company if you're going to entertain conservatives.

    TheRealFoo:
    I imagine his early retirement looked somewhat like this

    And you bet they didn't open a hatch in the ceiling.

    Captcha: burned (sorry, it was just too funny)

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to savar
    savar:
    Guy: Well, actually, angels watch over the Nagios server, so if it does go down, not only will they magically resurrect it, but you'll also be blessed with consciousness on your death bed. You: So I've got that going for me.

    Hey! There's no reason why a faith-based server monitoring program wouldn't work.

  • Robert (unregistered)

    Things like this do happen. Looking on Snopes, there's no mention, and the only hits on most of the terms point back to here! Variation on a theme perhaps.

    By the way, a room full of servers like that with 3 running A/C doesn't go only to 109F. And even if it was that low a temperature in the room, a computer can run at 109F just fine.

    For the other subject, the chances are somebody who is a conversationist to that degree is of a more liberal political leaning than not, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. Those are generalizations of course.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Rhialto
    Rhialto:
    anne:
    A liberal did a dumb thing. Therefore, all liberals are dumb.

    Nice logic there. I hope you're not programming anything important.

    And how is trying to conserve energy (by itself a laudable goad, albeit a bit misguided in this case) being "a liberal"? And why does that seem to be "wrong"?

    The whole green movement feels kinda hippyish, and they're also stereotyped as being a bit strident and narrowly focused, so there ya go.

    akatherder:
    Bart B:
    I really wonder when people don't stop and think "someone must have come up with a solution for this?". You know how 'much' server monitoring costs? NOTHING! It's called Free and Open Source Software, in this case, the excellent Nagios.

    It may be free, but it ain't excellent. I'll pick "Keep it simple stupid" any day of the week, but Nagios is way too simple and the configuration was way to messy.

    Here is a paraphrased conversation I had with a British fellow who helped us set ours up (smart guy).

    Me: How do we know if the Nagios server goes down and stops notifying us that servers are going down? Guy: Configure another Nagios server in another location to monitor this server. Me: Since my boss is going to ask me the same question... what if they both go down at the same time? Guy: You'll be right fucked then.

    Have both servers look at each other. The probability of both going down without a common cause is miniscule, and something that takes them both out, you're likely to notice anyway, like a major power outage (of course, the mail wouldn't work, so it doesn't matter).

  • BRus (unregistered)

    I actually worked in a company where the owner tried to save money by shutting down AC over weekend and every night in the server room. Setting aside the fact that it was stupid, inefficient and risky...Every morning I came to work in the heat of about 95 F room where servers were running just fine. Actually, it is very hard to find statistically meaningful data about the failure rates vs. temperature. I tried. Some general ideas - sure. But nothing to build the business case on. I vote fake.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to ASDF
    ASDF:
    quad:
    or by saving us all the trouble and just killing themselves thereby reducing all further things they could have possibly done to hurt the earth.

    save a tree, kill a hippie

    Or kill yourself, since you probably impact nature more than a hippie. Or kill lots of normal people. Gosh.

    (captcha: muhahaha, how appropriate)

    So Cho was just a pissed off environmentalist?

  • Pete (unregistered) in reply to Robert
    Robert:
    For the other subject, the chances are somebody who is a conversationist to that degree is of a more liberal political leaning than not

    Now, I know that in politics talking often means hot air, but even so...

    Pete

  • Pisanvi Nigar (unregistered)

    http://www.helenair.com/articles/2006/05/24/montana/a08052406_01.txt

  • Todd (unregistered)

    This sounds pretty fake. I was a senior Unix admin at a very large telco manufacturer with a very large server room. We had about 500 servers in there, everything from a Sun Enterprise 250 to E10k and Sunfire 6800, etc etc. Lots of EMC disk cabinets, NetApps, etc.... The weird thing was that the AC was on a separate power feed that was unreliable (the actual electrical company had trouble keeping the feed into the complex up). So we would lose power to AC with the servers up and running- and when that happened it got HOT - easily 100. The only time we lost disk (or any hardware) was inside the disk cabinets after being used 24hrs a day from around the world - and it was a grand total of 5 disks we lost. I find it hard to believe a server room this small could have such a huge hardware failure, even if the AC was out for a week.

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to redbeard
    redbeard:
    Could be. Considering I'm a part time admin with no pager and no cell phone and no way to tap into the phone system anyway, I don't have anything like this.

    There are four other people actively involved with our servers, two of whom do it full time. A few weeks back a water leak blew up the main power distribution panel feeding the server room. That caused the generator to kick on. Everything at that point was fine, but no one was notified. Then, at about 2 a.m., a hose blew off the generator, which promptly shut down. Again, no notifications went out. One of the full time IT people got a call as he got out of the shower at 7:30, "Hey, did you know everything is down?"

    So, yes, the IT team could be totally dependant on user complaints. That sort of thing costs money. And if it's a little too much, it doesn't get added.

    It's not just money. There are security issues too. Connecting your box to the outside world well enough to send an outgoing page can easily get your box owned, or worse.

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Moldylocks
    Moldylocks:
    Reminds me of when they got the thermostats reversed for the server room & the programmers room. As the servers (AS400's) warmed up it got colder in our room, which kicked on the heat in the server room... It was around 120-130 degrees when someone finally went in (because a PC-based print server died). The 400s never even hiccuped.

    I stood 20 feet away from an operating AS400 once.

    The wind from the exhaust fans was enough to make it inconvenient to read a pamphlet I was holding at the time...

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to SomeCoolGuy
    SomeCoolGuy:
    If that was my server room the guy had initiated a meltdown in, he would be facing more than just early retirement.

    When I read this story and think of "retirement" I also immediately think of "Blade Runner."

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