The dread sound of the squeaking caster in the humming data centre

Re: Not Me But...

...whilst an orderly shutdown was arranged.

How long did an orderly shutdown take back in the day?

And how long did it take to get everything booted up after an orderly shutdown?

Because I'm just curious to know, give that we have PC's and servers that can now boot up and be operating in less time to down a cuppa coffee.

Re: Gone fishing?

Also helps if you remember the castor oil on said castors. Preventative maintenance is your friend and all that.

Re: Gone fishing?

Oh, I dunno. Having incorrect caster can make your steering ponderous. In extreme cases it can prematurely wear wheel bearings ... which in turn could cause the reported squeaking.

Source: my 1915 Case traction engine, now sorted out & happy again.

Re: Gone fishing?

A dodgy caster would be putting the bait in the wrong place, a castor however, may steer you wrong.

Is that castor canadensis or castor fiber? I really had no idea either had a thing about castrating bos taurus.

I should really be more careful around the little buggers.

Re: Gone fishing?

Beware the castors in Quebec, they bite.

But their tails are tasty!

https://beavertails.com/products/

Re: Gone fishing?

A dodgy caster would be putting the bait in the wrong place, a castor however, may steer you wrong.

What a load of Pollox....

In this case, more of a Who, him? though, but yes, any port in a storm :-)

Re: What do you think ?

It's an excellent idea. But I think that "This week's Pascal tells us ..." has a nicer ring to it :-D

Re: Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

For this story they missed the obvious 'Stan' and, totally different colleague, 'Olly'

Re: Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

In the present climate, lets just call both of them Boris ??

Re: Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

If the goal is to keep it simple we should just call them all Bruce.

Re: Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

How about we call them 'Bruce', just to keep things clear..

Re: Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

I'm Brian and so's my wife...

Re: Not all serial cables are made equal...

Yeah, APC and it's propriety "serial" port.

Re: Not all serial cables are made equal...

I have posted previously about this. In my case it was under the stage at Glastonbury Festival while Slash's Snakepit were playing. Off went the UPS, the lighting control network and the intercom powersupply. Behind the rack with the band playing above my head I had no idea all the lights had gone off and the operator out front was screaming into a dead comms headset.....

Back when I were a boy...

My summer holiday job involved feeding a machine that turned rough planks into smooth planks and a barn full of saw dust. Inside there were lots of sharp things spinning very fast and occasionally a plank would get stuck part way through. The fix (as demonstrated by the machine's owner) was to shot-put the next plank in as hard as possible. Normally your left hand remains on the front end of the plank up to the last possible moment to accurately guide it to the input slot. Near the end of a long day I got a little careless and did not get my left hand out the way quick enough.

By the time I got home my blackened finger tips were so painful I applied the obvious remedy: straighten a paper clip, hold it with pliers, heat it on the cooker til it glows orange and burn a hole through each black finger nail to relieve the pressure. The smell was rather bad but the pain did reduce until the nails dropped off a few days later.

Re: trolleys in machine rooms..

Seem to recall reading that when they started locking doors in the CS dept at Berkeley that Richard Stallman used trolleys to break them open on the grounds that software was meant to be free so you shouldn't keep it behind locked doors.

Re: DEC Engineer

"One more turn, Delboy"

"Brace yer self, Rodney!"

Re: DEC Engineer

Late 90's, about to do our disaster recovery testing one weekend. Scenario involved a power cut to the server room, which I simulated by switching off the power to the room going into the UPS, to check that it did indeed initiate safe shutdown of all the Sun, Fujitsu and HP kit in the room. It was only at that point that it became clear that the electricians had run the electrical supply in parallel to the UPS rather than in series... It all went very quiet. Except for the UPS.

Re: DEC Engineer

Not related to trolleys but mention of DEC reminded me of a story of how when a couple of decades ago when FPGAs were relativley new and expensive that one of the DEC reasearch labs had a (by standards of that time) massive FPGA setup - unforrtunately they doidn't realize one of the disks in the system controlling it was failibg and they downloaded a corrupted programming config onto it and, as doubtless at that stage designers hadn't considered possibility of such a major programming error and as a result destoryed most of the array (seem to think "quarter of a million dollars" was mentioned)

Re: DEC Engineer

At a previous job, "some decades ago" (so back in the days when these devices constituted the contents of a significant chunk of rack space) a colleague told me how someone he knew had been employed by DEC testing processors prior to assembly into systems (or something like that). So he had this 'kin big PSU at one end of the bench and some very thick cables to daisy chain along the power terminals of the systems under test.

Then one day he (literally) got his wires crossed - when he flicked the switch, he let the magic smoke escape from a whole bench-full of processors. Apparently the insurance paid out - but with a condition that said person was re-allocated to a" less expensive if he gets it wrong" role.

But more directly related to the "switched the wrong thing off" part. At my last place one of the hell desk guys was talking a customer through power cycling a server. Consulting the notes/diagrams, the hell desk told the customer it was the bottom server in the rack - press and hold the power button. Of course it was the customer's fault for not recognising the difference between the bottom server in the rack - and the UPS below it that ran everything !

Re: DEC Engineer

Done a not entirely dissimilar thing myself. Shut down the computer using its console, turned the reset key and was surprised to see the console not spring back to life. But out of the corner of my eye, another one did.

Partly my fault for not checking more thoroughly that the console's and computer's microscopic labels matched up since I'd previously admonished the ops staff weeks previously for moving stuff like consoles about and just plopping them wherever it was convenient, such as on the roof of a completely unrelated system, but no, I was sticking my nose where it wasn't wanted. Fortunately(-ish), further incidents were precluded shortly afterwards by replacing them all with a rather peculiar serial-based LAN contraption controlled by a master console programmed in COBOL.

Re: DEC Engineer

Friend of mine did something similar, but it wasn't a Vax or some other server hosting jobs for users. It was one of the machines involved in hosting ntl,com, and as a result, he took out the website for a while. I seem to remember El Reg mentioning it in an article at the time..

Thankfully, the nearest I have come was a few years ago. One of our switches had crashed, so I went to the comms room to reboot it (which involved pulling the plug as I could not reach the power switch). There were a lot of switches in that room, so a lot of power cables, none of where were labelled. I traced the cable through to what I thought was the correct socket, pulled the plug and the wrong switch went off. Luckily I was able to plug it back in and get the switch booted up before anyone noticed. Surpising, considering it was a 24 port switch and every port was in use.

Re: I don't think that means what you think it means

Experience can include finding out that shit sometimes does inexplicable stuff.

Re: I have BOFH fantasies...

Ok, the server seems to be working again, but where did I leave the carpet & quicklime?

Didya checked inside the Head Beancounter's boot.... ?

We had a cage full of pcs that we'd just replaced. The bank's facilities guys insisted that as soon as the cargo lift doors opened on the loading bay level, moving it was something only they were allowed to do. They promptly moved it down a slight ramp and off the edge of the loading dock. I let them sweat for a few minutes before I admitted the computers were on their way to be recycled.

I did something quite similar not later than yesterday evening. We had a power failure during the week-end and the systems had not restarted. So I dropped by on my way back from a remote weekend.

The access to the server room is protected by a password operated door, linked to our LDAP. LDAP was done, door was not openable. And also the network was acting funcky for lack of proper DNS. But I have a key to override the door mechanism. So I could gain access to the server room and start doing my magic.

When I left the server room, everything was running fine but the door system. I left and oops, I had left my bunch of keys inside the locked room.

My first idea was to way until the morning, when the system would disengage (no password during day time) and I could walk in. Well, I started by scratching my head, then I considered waiting for the morning. But luckily I could finally SSH into the door control mechanism, disable it temporarily, go and grab my keys and re-enable the door security.