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AIRCON DOWN
Seems very urban mythy, but may just be eco-truthy.
Ash—you don’t want to do that.
And whoever that state employee was, can we get him/her/it hired at the IRS?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 07 10 at 10:03 AM • permalinkAsh, hope you is OK.
My girlfriend yesterday got diagnosed with a serious heart-condition yesterday by a doctor. The doctor then phoned up an expert who said “no, that heart-rate is totally normal for a pregnant woman of 38, stop wasting my time.”
Today she got diagnosed with fluid under the retina which has made her see spots for the past week…...
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 10 at 10:22 AM • permalinkThe double use of the word “yesterday” indicates my stress levels.
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 10 at 10:23 AM • permalinkLaugh not, ye skeptics.
I was just ordered to “look into” software to track and remotely control workstation power consumption (about 100 watts per).
In a datacenter with several mainframes and 500 stand-alone servers running 24/7. Not to even mention ancillary equipment.
This rings all too true to me.
#9 Cheers mate- all seems fine now though the vision in her right eye is still a bit crap.
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 10 at 10:33 AM • permalink#11
Trouble with drunken women is, if they’re drunk I’m usually even more drunk, and therefore even less attractive in their eyes than I would be if everyone was sober.
I like the way you’re thinking about the eyesight problem though.
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 10 at 10:42 AM • permalinkThat calls for a justifiable homicide right there. Jesus, don’t people know better than to piss off the hardware trolls?
Unfortunately, the CIO rarely allows the overweight, bathing adverse Asberger’s candidate to explain in his fully asocial, disdainful way exactly what kind of an asshat the offender was. I guarantee, people go to heroic lengths not to be on the receiving end of that twice.
I’m inclined to call bullshit, however it is possible the company got exactly what they deserved as:
a) Some wholly unqualified git was allowed access to the server room (i.e. no security) and
b) Nobody received an email or SMS when the temperature got too high.
c) They employ hippies. I can understand saving money on temperature monitoring and messaging services, but surely they could afford it if they layed off a couple of hippies.
Any large IT operation run like that deserves whatever it gets.
#13 I’ve never understood why guys seeking girls get plastered at the club. When I was a single guy, if I went out to drink, I’d get drunk. If I went out seeking a lady companion, I’d drink a coke or mineral water and BUY their drinks. It worked out really well. Somehow, they found me much more interesting without slurred speech/drooling/vomit.
#18 It’s not so much that. You go out for a drink (and drink only), have several and then suddenly decide it would be a REALLY good idea to have a go since all the females in the room so clearly find you extremely attactive, and it’s not as if you’re drunk at all, oh no….
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 10 at 11:15 AM • permalinkI don’t know, kids, my State’s computers failed June 20. Massive crash and took out most of the State’s systems.
http://www.timesdispatch.com and type in computer system and you’ll get the articles.
Makes you wonder.
Elizabeth
Imperial KeeperPosted by Elizabeth Imperial Keeper on 2007 07 10 at 11:22 AM • permalink#27 They also do a Van Halen cover: Okhotsk For Teacher
Posted by ThinAndBritish on 2007 07 10 at 11:39 AM • permalinkThis particular story may be an urban legend, but I know people who have questioned why a major computer center needs dedicated and constant AC. Some of them I would expect to pull a stunt like this.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 07 10 at 03:29 PM • permalinkPlease do not read worsethanfailure.com unless you are a trained IT professional. Reading that website can damage your opinion of the IT profession, and create doubts in your mind about the competence of IT people, and we IT types would rather the rest of you remained in blissful ignorance.
Seriously, I find that site (formerly thedailywtf.com) both delightfully funny and extremely depressing.
Posted by Chris Chittleborough on 2007 07 10 at 04:02 PM • permalink#6 & 7 Thinand
Hmm, there’s some pretty dicey quacks around these days!
A friend was diagnosed with some liver disease that would kill her within 12 months. She had biopsies, etc. Oops, they made a mistake. This was about, oh, 8 years ago. She’s still going strong. No liver disease.
How do they get to be doctors?
Though some are brilliant - no offence to our Doctors, andmy doctorsdoctors I have encountered - the good ones.A mine I worked at had a large server room. As we were on site 24 hrs a day, 7 days they lobbed the job of checking the air cons worked onto us.
No back ups at all, they failed a number of times and the room would have been well into the high 40’s within an hour or so.
Theyd rather risk 100,000 bucks worth of equipment than install 5000 bucks worth of backup air con.Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2007 07 10 at 06:43 PM • permalink#40
Theyd rather risk 100,000 bucks worth of equipment than install 5000 bucks worth of backup air con.
Maybe. However it could also have been insured for less than the cost of $5000 capital expenditure plus running costs.
Saying “fuck it” is sometimes a legitimate risk-management approach. I’m just sayin’...
At my old job, we had this kind of thing happen on a smaller scale. We had servers out at remote sites, and the server was mounted in a rack in a small room, and that small room had it’s own air con unit.
We found that some kept on failing on weekends because a “nice conciencous lady” was turning off the air con on Friday night before going home to save power. Of course it would all be ok by the time we got someone out there first thing on Monday as she got in at 7am and turned the air con back on. It was one of those offices out in the boonies that refused to give IT after hours access and wouldn’t call anyone out on a weekend to let us in. We just had to wait until Monday to look at it (and then they’d be screaming if we weren’t there at 7.15am).
We also had a certain cleaner who was fond of yanking out any power cable that was handy to plug in his vaccuum cleaner. We used to routinely lose servers in the data centre at night for no good reason, until someone was detailed to stay back one night and watch what went on. He always seemed to be able to pick the mission critical servers.
As for the air con in the data centre problem, we used to have this problem where building management would do a power failure test every now and then on a weekend. They’d fail the building over to generator and then back onto mains power. The problem for us is that it tripped the air conditioning units out, and they wouldn’t restart until someone came in, unscrewed the front panels and pushed a red button inside. Our idiot property manager, who was supposed to liaise with building management, never gave us any forewarning of these tests - even though he was supposed to. If we knew about the tests, all we had to do was schedule someone to come in with a screwdriver and do five minutes work once the test was complete.
The first thing we’d know about it is when I’d start to get SMS messages on my phone from the environmental monitoring system saying that the room was melting. Shortly after, another monitoring system would start sending me SMS’s saying servers were shutting themselves down thanks to the high temperature. I was at the footy once when this happened - had to skip the second half thanks to numbnuts.
Some older servers weren’t that good about shutting down gracefully - they just crashed.
All this was fine - I’d get the messages on say a Saturday afternoon, and I’d be in there within an hour to restart the aircon and bring all the servers back up. Few people would have any inkling that anything untoward had happened, apart from the property manager that received an earful. Not that it made any difference - he had the amazing ability to forget all about it within 5 minutes.
This all turned to shit a while later when I moved to a different job in IT and had to hand all my lovely monitoring systems and server rooms over to a dickhead. He refused to take any notice of the alerts piling up on his phone one weekend, and consequently the whole company was off the air come Monday morning, and the server room was baking. No hardware was fried, but some servers took a lot of coaxing to recover from an unexpected shutdown. He didn’t like my monitoring systems because he didn’t think of them, so he just ignored them. He suffered badly from “not invented by me”.
He managed to repeat that exercise several times over the years, and do worse. He never got fired. I got sick of it and left.
After numerous disasters thanks to the activities of a wide range of fuckwits, I am ready to believe that anything can happen.
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 07 10 at 07:29 PM • permalinkNicky was doing casual sub-editing work in the mid-90s at a newspaper that was still using a dedicated mainframe system installed in the early 1980s.
One evening he noticed the terminal on the next desk start wafting pale blue smoke.
Instead of ignoring a possible fire hazard (journalists desks are filled to overflowing with paper), he pulled the terminal’s power socket.
The next day the IT department’s own Rosa Klebb rounded on him for unplugging the smoker because the terminals were a devil to reboot.
He vowed next time to ignore any OWHS issues and let the place burn.
—Nora
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2007 07 10 at 10:05 PM • permalinkNora,
I doubt if there was a significant fire hazard. The smoke Nicky saw was due to the fact that electrical components are all made with a small amount of smoke sealed in. This smoke is essential to their operation. If the smoke is allowed to leak out, then the unit won’t work any more, and must be replaced by one with the smoke still intact.#49 Hi Ernie,
I understand what you’re saying. The thing with smoke and computers is like this for vehicle wiring harnesses.—Nora
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2007 07 10 at 11:04 PM • permalinkI have another dickhead story. It explains why sometimes company networks get wiped out by viruses and worms.
Think back a few years - word has come out that a worm called Slammer is in the wild, and the only protection is to install a patch on all PC’s and servers. We have a management meeting. Dickhead is given the task of getting all servers patched (which has to be done manually) and pushing the patch out to all PC’s (which can be done with a software tool).
As each week goes by, he reports back at our management meeting that the patching is going ahead.
Then one night, I am still at work and my monitoring system starts flashing red - all sorts of servers and data links are going off the air. I call the network manager - he is still at work, so he races over to have a look. We spend about 10 minutes trying to figure it out - it appears we have a network storm that is choking the network.
We call dickhead. For once, he answers his phone after hours. I put it to him - “Have all servers been patched?”
“Yes, everything has been done. I did them myself”.
Network manager and I go back to looking at the problem. After a few minutes, I decide to check the patch levels on the server that I am working on.
Lo and behold, the slammer blocking patch is not installed.
I check all the other servers in that row of racks. Network manager does another row.
None have been patched.
Since we have several server rooms, we think he might have misunderstood, so we remote into servers at our main centre and check them.
No patches.
By this time, we are fucked. Slammer has invaded the whole network - thousands of computers across hundreds of sites are infected, and no network traffic is able to get through. Essentially, we are back to the days of several thousand stand alone PC’s.
We can’t push out the patch - the traffic won’t get through, and besides, it’s no use patching the machine after it is infected. You need to patch it and dis-infect the machine. We can’t even push out the virus update that does the disinfecting.
We can’t even send a broadcast email to let people know what is going on.
The solution?
We have 40 IT staff running around for a week with floppy disks, going to each and every machine on the network, manually installing the patch and disinfecting the PC. Staff drive to the far ends of the state to visit our far flung offices. Sixteen hour days are routine for an entire week. Everyone ends up utterly shagged. No one can work until their entire site is disinfected, and people keep wandering into offices after we have left with infected laptops and causing network havoc again.
Is dickhead reprimanded?
No.
I suggested in very strong terms to our boss that he should be fired. Not for failing to do his job, but for lying. If you can’t trust someone, you just shouldn’t retain them. If he hadn’t lied and had just owned up to it, we would have pulled the plug on the network at that moment in order to stop the worm from spreading. It would have been a brutal cure, but it would have taken half a day to mop it up, not seven.
The other thing that still amazes me is that dickhead had done exactly the same thing a year before when another worm had come out.
That’s government for you though.
As I said, I have seen too many screw ups caused by human behaviour to discount this air conditioning story. Some of the items might have been changed to protect the guilty.
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 07 11 at 12:51 AM • permalink#53 - arrrgggh Unix-head alert! Run away! Run away!
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 07 11 at 07:41 AM • permalinkThis did prompt one of our Unix sysadmins to start refering to most Microsoft products as “virus 2000”.
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 07 11 at 09:11 AM • permalink
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So what if there aren’t any facts to support the story. It speaks to a Larger Truth and thus is true even if it is false. At least, that’s what lefty logic tells us.