A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?
- Reference: 1716795007
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/05/27/who_me/
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This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mel" who told us about his time as a field engineer for machines that ran Pick OS – a relic that our sibling site The Next Platform recently [1]reminisced about because it integrated an OS and a database.
Mel's employer had written software for the OS, even though he described it as "rare as rocking horse excrement."
[2]
At least Mel's client ran those rare wares on good hardware: an NEC machine that Mel described to us as "bulletproof-solid … seriously good gear, the likes of which I've not seen before or since."
[3]
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That "since" refers to the time elapsed since 1994 – when the box Mel worked on contained a 300MB 5.25″ ESDI full-height hard drive, an EISA caching DPT controller and a 33MHz 80486 processor.
"It was heavy iron for the time and serious iron for smallish businesses, supporting 32–60 users," Mel explained.
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But it still needed an upgrade – in this case to a board packing a '486 DX/50 processor.
"This board really rocked for the time, not only carrying a blistering-fast 50MHz '486 CPU, but also a nice phat 128K cache as well to make it really sing," Mel wrote.
The techie arrived at his client around lunchtime and found the NEC machine on a shelf under a desk.
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He then did a backup of the hardware config – EISA was good like that – before starting on the card replacement chore.
Suffice to say that this ancient machine had a lot of components inside – all packed close and cabled together. Mel was able to get the old processor card out, but the new one wouldn't quite sit in place. A many-pinned connector sitting at an odd angle appeared to be the culprit.
[7]Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job
[8]One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash
[9]Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy
[10]Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness
He decided a kinetic approach was the way to sort things out.
"I grabbed the nearest screwdriver, stuck the blade on the connector – and gave it a hearty whack."
Bad move.
"The connector collapsed, and the pointy end of the Philips head screwdriver skewered through it and mangled the machine's innards into a tangled, shorted mess," Mel confessed.
Remember our mention of the machine's location under a desk? That was the good news – it meant nobody saw Mel skewer the machine. It also meant he could stay down there and try to fix it without being observed.
Mel therefore scuttled off to his van to retrieve a torch, soldering iron, and a pair of tweezers, then spent the next two hours under the desk attempting to revive the machine.
When asked, he deflected that the situation was "just a technical issue with the card." In reality he was scared to let anyone see either the mess he'd made or his salvage efforts.
Miraculously, he was able to stitch the machine back together, and when he pressed the power button it returned to life. The backup worked, the new processor kicked in, and the job was done!
Nobody ever knew how close Mel came to stabbing the server to death with his screwdriver.
Years later, after he had retired, Mel was approached by the customer – not, thankfully, to be confronted about the awkward innards of the box. "I was asked to help migrate this same customer's machine to a new environment. I accepted and was paid handsomely for my work."
Mel wrapped his mail to Who Me by revealing "I've never told a soul of the near disaster that befell their system. Until today."
What's the worst damage you’ve done with a screwdriver? [11]Click here to send Who, Me? an email to share your story. ®
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[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/03/12/the-cloud-outgrows-linux-and-sparks-a-new-operating-system/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZlRZwYb0GBuBA4yyQbgxsQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZlRZwYb0GBuBA4yyQbgxsQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/20/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/13/who_me/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/who_me/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/22/who_me/
[11] mailto:whome@theregister.com
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I remember getting a bunch of new workstations for some computational chemists; one by one, the graphics cards would fail and would be replaced under warranty. I suggested to the vendor that maybe replacing all the the remaining cards would save both them and us time - they said no. So over the next few months the remaining cards failed...
I had a similar experience with a machine provided by a digital company somewhere Pacific. They provided it with 20 HDDs, which I was happy with because I could increase redundancy. Unfortunately, as I discovered sex months later, when I looked closely after a disk failed, the hardware was all 10 years old. I wanted them to replace all the drives with new, but they would only replace one with a cheery offer to replace more as and if they failed. They put it another years-old drive Six months later, 5 more died on the same night. ZFS so it managed, but I told them I reserved the right to reject replacements that were too old. During the excessive time that it took them to find more, all of the rest of the drives failed. ZFS is good but it's not miraculous, so, having lost all of my data, I transferred all five of my servers to their competitors and cancelled my account. The replacement ZFS server was also not new but the SSDs they installed were.
> Unfortunately, as I discovered sex months later,
Excuse me this is a family forum!
> Years later, after he had retired, Mel was approached by the customer
Well, we know why they chose to Pick OS him
Because he'd put a small pick through the connector?
"he was able to stitch the machine back together"
Yeah, because in those days, you could.
Good show, old chap.
486 DX/50
When I worked in a small computer shop in the early 90's we had a customer who bought a 486 DX/50 machine just after they were released. As these were so new we had to try four or five motherboards from different manufacturers before the machine would run correctly - at that time it was difficult to get motherboards that were stable running the processor at that frequency. If memory serves we only made that one, but we sold quite a few AMD 486 DX/40 machines as they were quite a bit cheaper.
As for percussive maintenance, we bought a batch of ten Samsung 170Mb HDD's when they were first released and my boss said to test one of them to see how good they were as we'd been using their 60Mb and 120Mb ones and the platters would start to degrade within a couple years and the discs would become unusable so we'd had to replace quite a few of them - the model number SHD3062A is etched into my brain because of this. I connected the first disk up and it spun up but there was no head actuator sounds so I tried tapping the side of the disk with a screwdriver quite firmly a few times to no effect. As the disk was outside my test rig I positioned it on its side then picked it up and then slammed it down onto the workbench which did the trick and unstuck the actuator. I ran my tests and the disks seemed ok, but we only ever had those ten 170Mb Samsung disks and instead started using IBM 170Mb disks which were quieter and very, very reliable.
Re: 486 DX/50
Had that with an IBM disk in an SGI Indigo.
I was on the phone to the engineer and he told me to take out the disk and bang it on the desk. I did, and he told me I hadn't hit it hard enough - he wanted to HEAR the disk hit the desk. So I did it again, put a dent in the desk, and he said "That was fine - try it now". Bugger me if the disk didn't start working....
Also had a colleague who went to pull out a card from a powered-on system - just managed to shout "NO!" in time to stop that from happening.
I recall an old 68030 machine at a friend's company developing an intermittent fault that was extremely hard to pin down. Ultimately, it turned out that when the machine ran hotter, the motherboard expanded a little, causing it to warp slightly. If it became convex as seen from the top, things kept working. If for some reason it turned concave, it failed. A tiny track on rear of the motherboard had a little fault, and in convex configuration the little gap remained closed, but in concave configuration it opened up. A quick solder fixed that, and the machine kept humming along nicely.
Been there, done that. Only in my case it was on industrial kit which had a hairline crack in a bit of track that caused it to fail every Monday morning, but after much thumping and switching off and on by the operators would spark into life, and was then good for the entire week (it wasn't run on weekends).
'pointy end of a screwdriver'
ooh a bit too technical for me. I think that sort of tool needs a special name. How about Malibu Mallet.
Technical Terminology
When I did my training in the Pattern Shop (wooden patterns used in moulding sand for metal castings), a 'Manchester Screwdriver' was the derogatory term for hammer.
Re: Technical Terminology
I've heard a hammer being referred to as a "persuader".
Re: Technical Terminology
Not heard of the Manchester variant , I’ve only come across the Birmingham version - wonder if there is any difference?
Lesson learned
The real lesson learned here is that screwdrivers are bad tools and specifically the wrong tool.
Everybody knows that a hammer is the right tool for the job.
Re: Lesson learned
"a hammer is the right tool for the job"
and if it isn't, then a bigger hammer is...
Re: Lesson learned
With the tiger kit car world, we have this phrase
Tiger tool no.1 hammer
Tiger tool no,1a a BIG hammer
Mind you building kit cars needs a whole set of tools, including (according to the author of the articles) a SWMBO which isn’t usually in a techies toolbox
In the early days of the IBM PC, we would have some adapter cards - or even motherboards - with intermittent problems. Send the box to the CE team for repairs, and it would come back with no fault found. (We even got into the habit of putting drops of tippex on cards so we could tell whether they'd actually been replaced.) Scraping a screwdriver across some of the circuit tracks would turn an intermittent into a permanent failure. And replacement parts then arrived.