That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse
- Reference: 1685086094
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/05/26/on_call/
- Source link:
To understand why, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Roland" who told us he does IT support and admin at a publishing company's warehouse.
The facility is one of those affairs with lots of conveyor belts rattling around to move books from racks to trucks, and back the other way.
[1]
"The conveyor system is controlled by a redundant pair of servers that remotely interface with the actual industrial conveyor control panels which are spread throughout the facility," Roland explained.
[2]
[3]
Roland's life became particularly interesting when one of those control panels failed, and it became impossible to move or sort stock.
"Without this we're effectively dead in the water," Roland explained.
[4]
The publisher's maintenance team quickly found the cause: a failed DC to DC power supply in one of the control panels.
Suppliers were summoned and told to supply a replacement part – pronto.
The best they could do was 24-hour delivery.
[5]
Which was when the maintenance team did something very sensible: ask Roland and his tech colleagues to solve the problem. Could they, perchance, provide a 2A 5V DC power supply?
Roland knew that plenty of computers have 5V rails, so went looking for something to do the job.
Sadly, this particular publisher used desktops that employ non-standard power supplies with only 12V and 3.3V rails.
Roland therefore dived into That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case. We all have one. His particular TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC even contained a stash of dusty old external power bricks.
"I finally found an ancient Sun Microsystems workstation in our datacenter that had an ATX power supply unit," Roland recounted, adding that he thinks the Sun box was an Ultra 5 workstation. Whatever model it was, the machine had PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, and an ATAPI optical drive.
[6]Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac
[7]Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun
[8]Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM
[9]Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?
Roland yanked out the power supply, one of the maintenance team wired it into conveyor belt control panel, and together they jumpered the PSU_ON pin to ground – a clever hack to force the PSU to power up and stay on.
It worked.
Which means we can make an esoteric pun by observing that a Sun workstation "sparced" the warehouse back to life. Because Sun used Sparc processors – geddit?
Maybe you hadda be there.
Roland says his colleagues in maintenance learned a lesson and now keep spare PSUs to hand.
But techies already know this – which is why TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC exists. And also why you might want to skip spring cleaning this weekend.
Have you found spares in unlikely places? If so, [10]click here to send an email to On-Call and we might feature your story here on a future Friday. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/19/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/12/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/05/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/21/on_call/
[10] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
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Drawer of redundant tech
Has *lots* of cables but *never* the one I need, so I have to buy yet another cable. And a spare.
For 2A @ 5v a USB phone charger would probably have done the trick.
Which means we can make an esoteric pun by observing that a Sun workstation "sparced" the warehouse back to life. Because Sun used Sparc processors – geddit?
Nice one Sun!
These puns are on Sun Fire today...
Too sunny for me!
What? It's not Sunday...
What, are you saying the Solar-is too bright?
He sounds like Sun guy...
Every discerning tech should have a TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC. In fact, when supporting oddball kit, many may even have a TRFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC (That Room Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case).
Many years back, working at a University with numerous odd labs of experimental kit to support, I had a TRFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC which came in very handy from time to time. One example was that we had two motion tracking systems (Optotrak 3020s - a £35k piece of kit). One of them was all set up with a Windows XP control PC running Matlab and worked a treat. A colleague was asked if they could get the other one working in the same way for an important experiment: "Of course, not a problem".
At least, until it turned out the second Optotrak was an older system with an ISA controller card, yet the version of Matlab we had required Windows XP. A problem given that ISA had become pretty much obsolete in the late 90s, yet XP hadn't been released until 2001. Yet, in my TRFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC, I'd retained various odd PCs of different specs, and soon managed to find an early Pentium III system that still had a lone ISA slot, yet had the performance to cope with Windows XP. Swap a bit of RAM around as well, and the motion tracker fired up just fine.
My Mantra*
Always keep one of everything! Sometimes two or three! One of my previous bosses loved the idea, and it came in handy. Then he left, and the new boss said "Get all this old crap out of the storage room!" Before we could comply we were presented with a need for terminator of some sort, my colleague said, we have one! And lo and behold it saved the day. I got to keep my hoard of old parts, but I did have to scale it back.
* I learned it from my grandpa, he was a part time television repair man back in the 50's and 60s. He had drawers and drawers full of tubes, it was my job to test all the tubes taken from dead TVs. When my dad passed away, I found a trove of "Just in case something breaks" bits and bobs.
Icon for stop throwing out working parts!!
Re: My Mantra*
True. The guy I took over from, proper electrical engineer, used to say "If you haven't got three, you haven't got any." Turns out I'm still filtering out what's really useful from his stash, as he decided to keep at least six of everything, even when the kit it was intended for had been in storage for ten years 'just in case'...
PSUs
Any PSU with 5v and/or 12v is never thrown out - they come in useful for all sorts of things!
The 5v/12v ones for powering external drives are especially useful for model railways controlled by RasPi's (yes, I'm that sad)!
TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC vs managers
It is my experience keeping TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC is VERY hard to actually keep around. Every once in a while people come along that think they know better in a position of supposed authority and the fight begins (over and over again) to keep TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC. And a lot of times it still disappears when your back is turned.
In my time in a final test/product qualification role I had a rack full of boxes of spares and cables. I could replace anything obscure in the system with a known good part (especially the known good part is important) and had bypass cables to bypass any cable or hose in the systems we had under test. I fought to keep that stuff around for the entire 4 years I worked there and regularly made use of it (still in proto-ish phase so lots of niggles to sort). By the time I moved on to a new role in the company it took about 2 weeks for everything (about 10 to 20k worth of parts) to be thrown out. If I had to conservatively estimate judging from just the issues I've been involved with since, they've lost at least 200k of time and parts due to not being able to efficiently diagnose problems since. Managers always think they can just order a spare part and it'll show up within a few hours. The reality (especially for obscure qualification tool parts for which we don't even have a full set of documentation) is of course very different.
The one law of TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC
The one law of TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC is that as soon as you *do* throw it away, it turns into TBOOTYHTOBSHKJIC: That Box Of Old Tech You Have Thrown Out But Should Have Kept Just In Case.
Guaranteed that within a month or two you need something that you vividly remember being in the box you just threw out.
Re: The one law of TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC
I moving house to another country, and I'm sure I'll be kicking myself for binning a lot of things I just didn't have room for...
Important rule
If you have such a Box/Room, always go in looking for something else or you will never find the bit you really want. Hands up all those who dive into such storage and immediately find the bit they were looking for a couple of days ago and just couldn't see
TRFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC (Those Rooms Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case) - aka TNMOC (The National Museum Of Computing)
The boss chucked mine out
I had a filing cabinet drawer full of power supplies for laptops, tablets, etc that the collage had scrapped. These often came in useful. The bloke who PAT tests everything used to complain about having to go through the drawer, and I suggested he didn't and I would get the supply PAT tested if I issued it. While on was on holiday, the boss decided to chuck the lot out. A few weeks later, his wife came to ask if I had a power supply that would fit her laptop. "I probably would have had, but you had better talk to your husband". I understand the replacement was quite expensive...
Hmmm
I have quite a large draw full of various wall warts - maybe I should advertise them as for sale to desperate techies.