Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild
- Reference: 1716535872
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/05/24/on_call/
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This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Don," who told us of his time in charge of tech at a business that exclusively employed Macs.
Don's tale took place in the '80s and involved the little-lamented AppleTalk protocol, proprietary routers, and 56k modems – all pressed into service to connect multiple locations in the Midwest of the US, and to connect those outposts to their printers.
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The biz wherein Don toiled was open six days a week, which meant that when the time came to upgrade its accounting software, he decided to start the job on a Sunday afternoon.
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"I knew the upgrade would take several hours, so this would leave me time to roll it back should there be an issue. So I settled in at my desk did my backups and broke out the upgrade checklist," he told On Call.
One item on that list was a database rebuild.
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Which failed.
So Don restored a backup and set the rebuild in motion again.
And it failed again.
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Then again.
[6]Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers
[7]I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA
[8]I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it
[9]Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right
By now the clock had ticked past midnight, and Don had a dilemma. Should he do a rollback and head home, which would mean devoting another Sunday to the job? Or should he press on and risk leaving the company in a mess when business resumed on Monday morning?
As he pondered those choices, Don made one more attempt to rebuild the database. This time decided that, instead of watching a progress bar, he would stretch his legs and visit the server room where the kit he was trying to upgrade lived.
When he entered the room, all was well. The Mac that ran the accounting software sat there with lights blinking merrily, an adjacent dot matrix printer dormant.
Then – noise and movement! The printer buzzed into life. And the lights on the Mac became less merry.
Don checked the machine from which he was driving the upgrade. It reported the database rebuild had failed again.
The solution to this situation was simple: Don picked up the printer and put it on the ground, so its vibrations would not disturb the server.
His next database rebuild attempt worked, and the upgrade finished without incident.
"Feeling incredibly stupid/humbled/annoyed/exhausted, I sat down on the carpet and stared at the wall until my co-workers came in," Don told On Call. "They signed off on the migration and I went home."
Don's efforts earned him Monday off. First thing on Tuesday he brought a proper rack for the server – so in future he would only have to handle good vibrations.
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/17/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/10/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/03/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/26/on_call/
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SSDs
I guess this is one of the issue that will become a distant memory as hardware migrates away from spinning rust!
Re: SSDs
I suspect the migration from dot matrix printers would be more successful in this context. Don't miss impact printers at all.
Re: SSDs
I miss their impact.
Re: SSDs
They are a cheap, and who doesn't like tractor-feed paper? I use 'em for overnight error log printouts on equipment that has small buffers for that kind of thing (more common than you might think, even in this day and age). I also use 'em to print out source code listings ... Hang all the necessary printouts on the wall, and "connect the dots" (mentally, or with colo(u)red bits of string) to get a better idea of the big picture of somebody else's idea of flow. Handy when trouble-shooting, occasionally.
Yes, I'm an old fogey. Beats the alternative.
Re: SSDs
We still use them for weighbridge stuff, as when a lorry comes in, it goes over the bridge, a print out is generated, the lorry then empties/fills (depending on if it's landfill waste, or taking on product) and over the bridge again, same paper is fed back in to had the new info added.. and then the paper is separated: top copy goes with the driver, 2nd sheet to accounts (physical backup to the data sent directly into the account system) and 3rd copy goes into the weighbridge files. We could do this on 3 different pages, and get the driver to sign 3 times, but NCR is easier...
Re: SSDs
Or with the migration away from dot matrix to laser printers, or to emailing out pdfs ...
date?
I didn't think 56k modems arrived until the late 90s, at least for 2-wire dialup.
Re: date?
It probably wasn't 2-wire dialup. 56K leased lines were common for the kind of business described back in the late '70s through the '80s, when $TELCO started trying to sell businesses on 2B+D ISDN and/or Fractional T1.
Those dot-matrix printers really could shake up a storm
I remember the page-feed printers from way back when I was a wee operator. When someone launched a rather intensive print, they could end up visibly shaking from side to side as the print head moved along and swung violently back.
No wonder they were so heavy. If HP were making them today, they would literally shake themselves apart.
Re: Those dot-matrix printers really could shake up a storm
Those things are smooth as silk and quiet ... at least compared to my 1961 IBM 1403, which can probably moonlight as a paint and rust scaler on battleships.
Next to a company where I was working (late last century) was an empty plot of land that some council drone decided to slap a big blue COMMERCIAL zone on in their real-life Sim City. There was somet problems with the ground there that meant they had to anchor any new buildings quite far down, which meant long poles. Thankfully, they didn't use pile drivers[0] to do this, but rather some form of vibrating technique that propagated throughout the whole area as they were doing it for hours on end. That and some mention of coming controlled explosions triggered our management to demand that we put huge domed rubber bumpers on all loose computer equipment in our building. It took us the better part of three months to complete, and I still have nightmares about both the smell and the stickiness of the industrial strength double-sided tape we used to stick those bumpers on.
[0] Seriously, the sound of a pile driver echoing off a wall for hours on end is probably the worst sound in the world. DU-DUM DU-DUM DU-DUM DU-DUM...
Vibrohamers are fun. I met them with a client who ran crawler cranes. Lift this large unit up on the crane, put it over the end of the pile, turn on the hydrolytics, and have the ground shake under you..
My previous employers were metal bashers - a 1000t Stanko press running all day* could be really annoying given the noise and vibration caused.
*We weren't allowed to run it overnight due to noise complaints, despite the fact the industrial estate was there long before the housing right behind the factory.
Canary Wharf workers near a pile driver have had to explain in their conference call with other sites what is going on.
Earthquakes...
Having acquired responsibility for a site in New Zealand one of the first things I did was sign off on a decent server rack - apparently the servers were just sitting on the concrete floor of the office, in a country that has been known to experience the occasional earth tremor!