back to article Squirrel sinks teeth into SAN cabling, drives Netadmin nuts

Ooh! Friday is here! This means it's time for On-Call, in which El Reg acknowledges that misery loves company by sharing stories of jobs gone awry. This week, meet “Allan” who used to work in a place where the server room “had a glass panel wall with a view into the main operations area." "This was sometimes handy," Allan …

Page:

  1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    Best traps

    The best preventive traps are the glue ones. You fold them up and they form a glue tunnel. Critter of any size from field mouse to a rat goes in and there it remains.

    If you put a normal trap under a raised floor there will be someone missing fingers after they have forgotten it is there and try to run cables. Either that or cables/fiber chopped in half. The glue ones are humane to the human personnel which IMHO is probably more important. You also do not get the mess with poison bait. While rats and mice eat the bait where they find it, squirrels and "edible" doormice* take it somewhere else like on top of a server or NAS grille and eat it there so the crumbs get into the machinery.

    I have seen the glue ones sold in Euriope, but not in the UK. If you are setting up a new building make sure you put a few of them in critical places under the raised floor. Replace annually or when they start to stink (you could have guessed by now - I have had to deal with this one).

    (*) The edible doormouse is the European vermin from hell - everything a rat does + walk on vertical walls and ceilings and dig tunnels as well as chewing through anything except steel mesh on its way as well

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Best traps

      Glue traps will probably be banned soon in the UK. Most definitely not a humane form of pest removal.

    2. Fursty Ferret

      Re: Best traps

      The reason they're not sold in the UK is because it's generally considered anti-social to let an animal die of dehydration and stress, regardless of whether it's a mouse, rat, squirrel, cat, dog etc. Such traps have to be inspected on almost an hourly basis and are definitely inappropriate for an isolated environment.

      I bet you tortured ants with a magnifying glass when you were a child.

      1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

        Re: Best traps

        Agreed, glue is mean. Humanely catching and releasing is impractical and maybe illegal, as noted. Therefore the real humane option is a death trap, plus planning how to execute (humanely) a trapped animal that wasn't killed. I think I had in mind "crush its head flat with a brick", but it didn't arise.

        I had mice. I'm not an unkind person, I think, but I decided that the only way to not have mice was to kill all the mice.

        Dispose of bodies in little tied plastic bags, like dog poo. (although, not hung around tree branches in public parks. Although, would feed birds, of a certain kind, in winter.)

        One mouse may have got away, perhaps mortally injured, since the last time a trap (rat size, guaranteed kill, I got two once) was tripped, there was no mouse and no bait but after that the traps, and also my food supplies, were not disturbed.

        1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Re: Best traps

          Humanely catching and releasing is impractical and maybe illegal

          It's certainly illegal to trap *and release* grey squirrels[1] in the UK.

          [1] Also (I think) applies to anything legally classified as "vermin". So, no trapping and releasing your local politicians..

        2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Re: Best traps

          I had mice.

          It might not surprise you (given my posting name) that I've never lived in a house with a mouse problem. Or a rat problem.

          Except in the sense of treading on squishy mouse guts at 2am..

          Current generation of cats include 2 ex-feral farm cats. They are formidible hunters but never, ever bring kill into the house - even though we got them at 3 months old they had already learnt that hunting is for stuff to eat. Except for rats. They kill those and leave the corpses in the garden for us (or a passing fox) to dispose of.

          1. AbelSoul

            Re: Best traps

            It might not surprise you (given my posting name) that I've never lived in a house with a mouse problem. Or a rat problem.

            I never had a mouse problem or a rat problem until I got my cat. He was already about a year and a half old and has a habit of catching various creatures and bringing them home, usually (although by no means always) in pretty rude health. Everything from mice, voles and shrews, through frogs and newts, to rats and birds, but mostly mice.

            Last summer he was sometimes bringing in three or four critters a night. This makes for some "hilarious" late night escapades, trying to catch and release the wee beasties.

            I live in the city centre, about half a mile from the nearest water course and had no idea there was so much wildlife outside my back door.

            1. cdegroot

              Re: Best traps

              Given sufficient cats, there will be not much wildlife outside your back door. I decided that cats are indoors pets (fresh air can be obtained by our 3 cats on our catio ;-))

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Best traps

                I quite like the idea of a catio. I have the only house in the area without dogs, so I get all the neighborhood cats, plus my two to fill out their glaring. There is a big male who leaves me "rodental gifts," last summer I got a whole grey squirrel! I have a set of cat doors for my two to get in and out, and a few summers past a rat got in. Not sure if the tuxedo cat brought it in, although I suspect it just came in the cat door. Anyway, she would not hunt it at all. I even cornered the rat behind the fridge, slid it out, and offered up kitty to... she walked away, and the rat ran off! Anyway, it was attracted to water, and I trapped it in my bathroom, then manually grabbed it and took it to my pot shop where I released it to a nearby field and a RV sales lot. It probably took up residence in an old trailer. Fun times with the cats.

            2. J. Cook Silver badge

              Re: Best traps

              @abelsoul: There have been some studies done that suggest that cats do this in order to teach us Terrible Big Things how to Cat properly and how to hunt. :)

        3. el_oscuro

          Re: Best traps

          I had a bat infestation in the attic and called the county for advice. Nothing like having a bat fly into your bedroom at 3am!

          Any the contractor devised some ingenious one-way traps to get rid of the bats - a small pipe attached to the vents which led downward and away from the house. When the bats left to go search for food, they would be able to make it out through the trap, but couldn't get back in. No more bats!

    3. Korev Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: Best traps

      "Edible dormouse"?

      I think there's quite an obvious way of dealing with them.

      1. Rich 11

        Re: Best traps

        Dormice were a Roman delicacy. Recipes have survived.

    4. Dr Dan Holdsworth

      Re: Best traps

      Clearly the OP doesn't know how to safely and legally trap wildlife.

      Best practice for the UK at least means that all snap traps such as the old Fenn mk4 and mk6 (soon to be banned for squirrels in favour of more certain-to-kill traps) had to be set somewhere that non-target species such as dogs, cats, roving network engineers and the like couldn't accidentally set them off. This generally means setting them inside a tunnel made either of mesh, or of some other durable material.

      Rats, mice, squirrels and the like generally cannot resist the temptation to have a look inside any tunnel, hole or similar thing they come across, in case there is something to eat in there. This propensity can be improved by baiting the trap with peanut butter, in such a way that the bait is beyond the trap along the route the animal has to follow. This generally ensures a kill.

      Mouse traps are a different proposition. Generally speaking, you get what you pay for with mouse traps and the cheap pressed-metal garbage off Fleabay are so insensitive that they don't work. Electrocution traps are best, and some can even be remotely monitored by SNMP to determine when they have caught something. Another interesting design is the Nooski trap, which uses an elastic rubber ring to strangle the poor victim. Not nice, but most effective and doesn't splat guts all over the place.

      The final trick to try is the cellulose-based rodent baits. These work by dehydrating the animal to the point of collapse, but only work on rodents so anything else mooching along and eating the bait won't get killed. This bait has the other advantage of not actually being a poison, so no certification is needed to handle it.

      1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

        Re: Best traps

        Clearly the OP doesn't know how to safely and legally trap wildlife.

        1. Who told you I have used them in the UK. There are other countries where stuff that chews on your cable is protected only if it is a protected species. If it is not it is fair game and sod the humanity of the method :)

        2. As far as safety, safety of the humans first, safety of the VERMIN second.

        What you forget is that story is about squirrels. Squirrels and doormice are not rats or mice. They are an infestation from hell if you get them.

        You cannot safely install any trap in under-floor space or roof space. It is a recipe for removed fingers because people always end up pushing cables through by touch alone. With squirrels and the f*** edible doormice you cannot use bait safely. They will take it somewhere, eat all of it, die in an obscure but warm place (on top of a power supply usually), then rot through and leak into interesting places. Even if they do not die there, they will drop crumbs into the fan grille into that so you will be ingesting warfarin powder when servicing equipment. This is in addition to dropping their dung into it and it carries a set of diseases you rather not know. A high-end respirator becomes a necessity when working.

        You cannot use normal traps. They ignore them as they move either high above or in the under-floor/ceiling space. They are not rats that scurry next to the wall. They will do it ONLY if there is no other route, otherwise you will see the f*** jumping across racks. The exception here is doormice which will come and steal the bait out of 90% of trap models in front of you completely ignoring you as an irrelevance.

        Last, but not least - due to their hearing and senses being in the same range as humans they are not affected by ultrasound and EMP pet repellent equipment.

        So your choices are glue or patience and a pellet gun. The second one is somewhat humane if used correctly, but you have to have no other job but to sit with it in a server room overnight. You are also limited in terms of having a clean shot in making sure there is no equipment behind the target.

        Most importantly - once you got rid of them (by whatever method needed) do not hesitate to spend the money on a truck roll of chickenwire and rodentproof the whole place.

        1. TomChaton
          WTF?

          @Voland's right hand

          You are Carl Spackler AICMFP

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Best traps

          "So your choices are glue or patience and a pellet gun."

          One of my first jobs was with biological supplier mostly dealing with schools*. One of the products was dead rats for dissection. Over the years a few had escaped and they bred. The head of the microscope slide section decided to stay in one evening with a gun and potted one. Then he remembered rat blood often has trypanosomes and went to fetch a syringe intending to make up some slides. He should have taken the dead rat with him; by the time he got back the others had dragged it away, presumably to eat.

          After a little while they went bust. They'd invested in making microscopes just at the time the Japanese were moving into the school microscope market. It must have been one of the receivers' odder jobs. There would have been some strange assets. One of the set items for A-levels that year was a bull's eye. For weeks I'd been visiting the slaughter house and come back with bags of bulls' eyes. The schools had got wind of the impending doom so hardly any ordered them. There was a big vat of them steeping in formalin.

          *at the same time SWMBO was a teacher. She reckons we still owe her some dissecting scissors.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: Best traps

            "He should have taken the dead rat with him; by the time he got back the others had dragged it away, presumably to eat."

            I hope they remembered SIr PTerrys advice, "Make sure you don't eat the green wobbly bit."

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Best traps

          @Behemoth - You sound exactly like a chap I knew who once had to deal with a (rapidly multiplying) family of squirrels which got into the insulation gaps and crawl spaces of his house. He was never the same where squirrels were concerned...

        4. el_oscuro

          Re: Best traps

          Another way is to use one way traps. You have to rodent proof the place anyway, and that means finding out where they are getting in. The one way trap is some sort of pipe that they can fit in that leads down and out, but doesn't allow them back in.

          The contractor that cleared up my bat infestation did this and it worked perfectly.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Best traps

        i>Rats, mice, squirrels and the like generally cannot resist the temptation to have a look inside any

        >tunnel, hole or similar thing they come across

        Shouldn't you have used the Paris icon?

        1. Rattus Rattus

          Re: "Shouldn't you have used the Paris icon?"

          He said tunnel, not hallway.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: "Shouldn't you have used the Paris icon?"

            Someone up there DID mention a cardboard box ...

      3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Best traps

        ""Electrocution traps are best, and some can even be remotely monitored by SNMP "

        IoT, Internet of Traps? Is that a thing? How good is the security or might hackers cause the mousepocalypse by interfering with them? Would that be a DDoT?

      4. zen1

        Re: Best traps

        SNMP? Have to be a security threat some how...

    5. Kubla Cant

      Re: Best traps

      The edible doormouse is the European vermin from hell

      It's actually illegal to trap your own glis glis (edible dormice) as they're protected. Doesn't make them less of a pest.

    6. mstreet

      Re: Best traps

      A former room-mate of mine once bought a pack of those traps, insisting that they were more humane than the 'quick-kill' variety.

      If a night of listening to a mouse vainly attempt to escape wasn't enough to change her mind, finding the next morning that the mouse had literally torn it's own arm off, as well as the presence of some important looking, formally internal organs embedded in the glue, certainly did.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @VRH, Re: Best traps

      I prefer to buy Kimodo Dragons & let them run wild through the place. If a boss gets uppity, a salesdroid shows up, or someone starts talking in buzzwords, feeding the remains to the Dragons is a great way of getting rid of the evidence.

      Best of all is the fact that you can train them to accept a harness, slip a bit of cabling into the ring, & let them do the cable runs for you! Just have a disposable coworker at the other end with half a dead rat in hand. When the screaming starts the cable is where it needs to be & you're short one annoying coworker.

      *COUGH*

      I'll get my coat, it's the one with the Dragon treats in the pockets...

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: @VRH, Best traps

        "I prefer to buy Kimodo Dragons & let them run wild through the place. If a boss gets uppity, a salesdroid shows up, or someone starts talking in buzzwords, feeding the remains to the Dragons is a great way of getting rid of the evidence."

        You are the BOFH and I claim my £5.

      2. Stoneshop
        Holmes

        Re: @VRH, Best traps

        I'll get my coat, it's the one with the Dragon treats in the pockets...

        According to Mark Carwardine and Douglas Adams, Komodo Dragon treats are rather goat-like, in shape, size as well as appearance. So either you have a coat with Pockets of Holding, or s/c/g/.

    8. Stoneshop
      Headmaster

      Re: Best traps

      I have seen the glue ones sold in Euriope, but not in the UK.

      Even when Brexit concludes the UK will still be part of Europe, just not the EU.

    9. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Best traps

      All this squirrel love, wait until you get them in your home roof space then you won't care how you kill the little feckers.

      1. Chris King

        Re: Best traps

        Ditto your basement. Nothing like running round a basement for an hour with a cardboard box, trying to catch one particularly skittish squirrel.

        I got him though, and I let him go in the nearby park. The ungrateful bastard promptly ran out into the road and got himself squished under a bus.

        Oh, and he crapped in the box before being let free.

    10. Number6

      Re: Best traps

      Probably not suited to catching squirrels, but for rats and mice, I have three of the best extermination devices Mother Nature can provide. They do have a few downsides, such as clawing the furniture and walking across (or sitting on) my keyboard as I type, but they're cute and that more than makes up for these problems. Not forgetting they're the reason we have such a good internet now (well, them and porn).

      1. PeteA

        Re: Best traps

        Ours are faulty! We've got four, and they're all very good at catching pests and bringing them home but haven't grasped the killing bit. The cuteness bit's broken too, there's nothing cute about a mouthful of rat being paraded into the living room before release under the sofa. We've taken to having (properly enclosed and protected) traps in strategic positions to deal with unwanted live gifts.

    11. drveritgo
      Meh

      Re: Best traps

      The poster needs more experience with animals, (s)he clearly does not currently understand just how unbelievably horrific glue traps are. I would rather risk my own injury than subject a living creature to tearing it's own limbs off, and leaving its organs behind.

    12. Pat Harkin

      Re: Best traps

      Squirrel traps are HUGE and expensive - they're not "deploy and forget" items; they're for short-term seek and destroy missions only. Apart from anything else, you don't want something the size of a dead squirrel rotting in a forgotten trap. (Said with feeling in relation to two sets of burglar alarm cabling chewed through a year apart) I now have an ultrasonic repellant - I think the little bastards use it like whale song to get their babies to sleep.

  2. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge
    Headmaster

    SAN?

    Is the A and N in SAN just to make it sound like LAN or WAN?

    I'm labouring under the impression that SAN stands for "Storage Area Network" , if correct its one of the stupidest acronyms since PVR

    Storage - yes , Area - what? network - not really!

    I dont care if your raid arrays are linked by a cable , or a switch , that hardly warrants note in the title of the system, cos everything is - see IOT

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SAN?

      Storage - yes , Area - what? network - not really!

      "Area" could be server room, data centre, campus, depends on the size of the network.

      "Network" - why 'not really'? A large data centre will have lots of storage arrays linked by fibre to SAN switches so you can dynamically assign LUNs from any array to whatever servers you need. Someone needs a VM with x GB storage? Just provision the VM, create a LUN on a handy array, and configure the SAN switch just as you would for VLANs on the comms network. It's certainly a network.

      1. Bronek Kozicki

        Re: SAN?

        "it is network, but not as we know it"

    2. Blotto Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: SAN?

      @Prst. V.Jeltz

      its a network of storage systems, as opposed to a single storage device connected to a network aka Network Attached Storage aka NAS.

      a NAS is not a SAN, they are both different but can appear the same to systems that connect to them.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: SAN?

        Not only is a proper network, but you can run a SAN over ethernet (FCoE) or IP (FCIP) and even do it the other way around and run ethernet or IP over fiber channel, though the latter did not see much use.

    3. Sgt_Oddball

      Re: SAN?

      I think you're thinking of a NAS same letters but less advanced.

    4. TitterYeNot
      Headmaster

      Re: SAN?

      "I'm labouring under the impression that SAN stands for "Storage Area Network" , if correct its one of the stupidest acronyms since PVR"

      I think your confusion stems from the fact that in most small server farms, most non-storage techies would describe the shared storage that they see hooked up to their favourite cluster by fibre as a SAN, whereas it's usually not - it's more likely to be a storage array, which is similar but definitely not a SAN.

      A SAN is indeed a storage array network, independent trays of disks hooked together by fibre or copper interconnect and SAN switches to form a storage network, operating under the control of one (but usually more) SAN controllers, which present an abstracted view of the storage to an external network or server clusters. Usually found in big server farms with lots of blades etc. requiring distributed storage.

      Disclaimer - not a storage techie, but I've been nearly bored to death enough times by those who are* not to make the mistake of getting my storage terminology wrong again.

      * Not knocking storage techies, I've been the recipient of enough glaze eyed stares when I try to explain why I need sticky sessions for my application cluster...

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

        Re: SAN?

        ok, ok , its a network

        now what about the A in the middle? I LAN and WAN the A is crucial , the A is what the 2 terms are describing , but whys it in SAN?

        1. John Riddoch

          Re: SAN?

          A SAN can spread a relatively large distance - I've worked in places where the SAN has stretched several miles to the DR datacentre, so you could, for example, run clustering between sites (makes for an easy DR solution, simply fail over the cluster).

        2. Blotto Silver badge

          Re: SAN?

          It's well documented

          Maybe try Wikipedia

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network

      2. Dwarf

        Re: SAN?

        Sticky sessions are on the LAN for front-end connections to the app servers and are not relevant for storage platforms that use proper protocols (FC) where they have multiple concurrent connections to all visible paths to the same LUN's. There is no session stickiness as all working paths are just load balanced.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sqirrel Latrine

    This one reminds me of the time we had to call in the humane pest controllers to deal with sqirrel hiding in the roof above the boss's office.

    He wasn't initially bothered by the rustling in the roof but eventually drew the line when the squirrel decided that his office printer made an ideal latrine.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Sqirrel Latrine

      Replace printer with circular file. Proper place for both Boss and Squirrel output. Sorted.

      Now come up with a way to get rid of racoons shitting in the valley between roof and dormer. Garbage fed racoons shit the most vile smelling shit I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Especially when fermented nicely in the morning sun. It permeated about 1200 square feet of a modern, energy tight, air tight building. My solution was to staple strawberry anti-bird netting over that section of roof ...

Page:

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like