Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter
- Reference: 1662708485
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/09/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we will refer to as "Maurice", who brings us a tale of the Ferranti Argus 500, a computer created to assist one of the UK's early attempts to build surface-to-air missiles.
Maurice came across the machine during a stint in the Army and recalls them as being accompanied by "big old Winchester-style disk machines, the ones that looked like spin dryers and took platter disk packs, one active and one backup."
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None of these machines were small, so the Argus and its disks lived in their own air-conditioned cool clean room.
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Keeping this rig alive was of sufficient importance that Maurice had a phone line in his quarters – quite a luxury. The heyday of the Argus predated most homes having a phone.
His line, of course, rang late one night with news that the machine had crashed and produced a burning smell. Attempts by less-skilled staff to revive the machine had failed.
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Maurice found a fried disk cabinet, installed the hot spare, and went back to bed.
The next day civilian technicians opened the dead disk and found "particles of polystyrene insulation all over the disk pack."
The source of the 'styrene was a mouse that had burrowed into the disk cabinet and scattered material onto the disk, causing that burning smell.
[6]Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist
[7]Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'
[8]Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user
The mouse was long gone, but Maurice wanted to know how it had found its way into a supposedly clean room.
"We investigated and found that that the night shift was given boxes of rations," he explained. Further sleuthing produced the revelation that staff had sweltered through some hot summer nights and decided that dining in the computer room was justifiable relief. It gets worse: some even stored their food in the computer room, in lieu of a fridge.
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Mice followed. As did the incident Maurice was required to address.
The Ferranti was a primitive, pre-GUI machine. Maurice found an amusing upside in the incident: he claims the machine he worked on was the first Ferranti with a mouse!
What have you discovered going on inside the datacenter that really should have been done somewhere else? Share your story by [10]sending a message to On Call . ®
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"But this is the cold aisle, not the shopping aisle"
I did allow a colleague to put some shopping in the computer room to keep it cool on a very hot day, but well away from any actual equipment.
With their powerful air conditioning, server rooms can be great places to dry wet clothes.
Smaller buddies
I once had the pleasure of assisting a user who wasn't the neatest person. They ate constantly at their desk. One day the keyboard quit working properly. The desk was always cluttered with notebooks, binders and lots of empty food wrappers and empty paper cups with remnants of hot chocolate or coffee. They demonstrated the problematic keyboard, and indeed, it missed the T and the A. I decided to swap the keyboard, and upon clearing some of the debris, and moving the keyboard, I saw a hoard of ants crawling about, in and out of the keyboard! I gave them the oldest crappiest keyboard in storage, and promptly took the keyboard back to the office, a daring colleague opened the keyboard, and we found a whole colony of ants going about their business!
Icon is self explanatory, I hope!
Re: Smaller buddies
I thought everyone had moved off Ant onto Maven?
Re: Smaller buddies
It wasn't Terry Pratchett by any chance -- see his comments on the importance of ants to the working of HEX, the computer, and it's signage "Anthill Inside" :-)
A learning experience?
So the rodents were more educated than the operators, and it made Maurice look amazing?
GNU Terry Pratchett, and GNU Queen Elizabeth II
Argus 1000?
Was Argus 500 possibly preceded by Argus 1000? Just wondering.
No explosives in the tech support room
I managed a tech support team our office was beside the DC in a secure area. I thought I had a team of sensible admins until one of them decided it was perfectly OK to bring in a bag of fireworks into the office one lunchtime as he couldn't be bothered walking home with them (400 meters from the office) after buying them. I had to send him home with the fireworks but he refused to go until I had formally introduced a no fireworks in the office rule.
A couple of weeks later I idly asked what was in the big box another team member had brought in. "Rocket Motors" he explained. When I asked why they were in the office he explained that they were not 'terribly stable' and he was worried about his car being damaged if they ignited in the summer heat, Cue a shouting match with a 40 year old who held 2 PHD's on why I was not willing to host his rocket motors in our non air conditioned office next to several millions of pounds worth of hardware and the core network supporting several thousand users. He lived a 30 minute drive away so was sent home for the day, bitterly complaining that 'there was no rule against it this morning'
We then had to have a formal rule that explosives were not allowed in the tech support suite.
Re: No explosives in the tech support room
Not IT but back in my much younger days I did a bit of potholing. One of the experienced cavers was also a licensed explosives technician as they occasionally cleared rockfalls in caves.
He recounted the occasion when there was a fire alarm at the school where he worked so they all evacuated out to the car park - right next to his car which happened to have a few sticks of gelignite (or similar) in the boot ready for the evening's expedition! He kept quiet.
Re: No explosives in the tech support room
"We then had to have a formal rule that explosives were not allowed"
I'm not sure we've got that one covered where I work - Now I'm going to have check.
Remotesite
I went to a remote site in Jo'burg. you know the one with just a rack for patching flat networking and possibly a server in the rack.
I found that the cleaner thought that the bottom of the rack was ideal for storing the mop and bucket in.
I was there to relocate the "server room" and the local contractor thought it was better to have the servers and stuff at the top and the patch panels at the bottom not thinking about things like .. stability ...
Wine cellar
When I worked in post-production in Soho, one of the engineers was a renowned gourmand. He kept wine in the server room.
Nice stable temperature.
Nice temperature for beer
I worked with a guy who was suddenly retired due to the onset of ill health. When I was clearing out his stuff from the computer room I found a stash of cans of bitter inside an old 19" cabinet. Explains why we'd see very little of him between morning and evening.
Something similar, but without the mice.
I popped into the machine room to check something on one of the HP racks. Opened the back of the cabinet and found someone's shopping in there! I went back out to the office and asked the obvious - who was storing their Tesco shopping in a rack and why? Turns out it was one of my colleagues - they thought it would keep their shopping cool until they went home.
Yes we had large "No food or drink past this point" signs, just none that said "No shopping past this point"!