What Bizarre IT Setups Have You Seen?

MicklePickle wonders: "I was talking to a co-worker the other day about the history of our company (which shall remain nameless), and he started reminiscing about some of the IT hacks that our company did. Like running 10BaseT down a storm water drain to connect two buildings, using a dripping tap to keep the sewerage U-bend full of water in a computer room, (huh?). And some not so strange ones like running SCSI out to 100m, and running a major financial system on a long forgotten computer in a cupboard. I know that there must be a plethora of IT hacks around. What are some you've seen?"

the U-Bend

[Helix150 (177049)]

Just to clarify- the U-Bend is what prevents bathrooms and drains from smelling horrible. Inside the drain, shower water, sink water and toilet waste all mix together. As you can imagine this smells horrible. So, where every toilet, sink, shower, etc connects to the drain system there is a 'u-bend'- a downward dip in the pipe which stays full of water. This prevents air from flowing out of the empty drain.
Most sinks have their u-bend visible under the sink and look like this:
http://twenteenthcentury.com/uologos/ubend_shaded. png [twenteenthcentury.com]
Water flows in the top, and out the back. Because the back is higher than the bottom of the bend, the bottom stays full of water at all times, preventing air from passing.

Problem is, if you leave a drain long enough without water passing through it, the water in the u-bend can evaporate, leaving an empty pipe and allowign the nasty sewer smell to escape. Thus, leave a faucet dripping to keep the U-Bend full!

Re:the U-Bend

[TFoo (678732)]

The U-Bend isn't just for smell, it is also a safety issue: sewer gases can be poisonous or even explosive if allowed to collect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_gas [wikipedia.org]

Re:the U-Bend

[Animats (122034)]

Yeah, and it's a huge hassle in vacant commercial buildings. Somebody needs to run every water tap and flush every toilet about once a month, or the whole place will stink up. Then the smell gets into the carpeting, which makes it hard to rent the building.

For special situations, there are calibrated drip valves. These are often found as part of fire sprinkler systems, which usually have a drain valve for when you need to drain the system for maintenance. The water from the drain valve has to go somewhere, which usually means a sewer connection. But you can't hook a water line to a sewer line; there are situations when you'd suck sewerage into the water system. So there has to be a vacuum break open to air. After the vacuum break, there's a U-trap with water to keep sewer gas inside. But since such drains are seldom used, the water will evaporate. So a tiny bit of water has to be dripped into the drain to keep up with evaporation. There are special "drip valves" for this.

One of the things you need to know about if you run large data centers.

Re:the U-Bend

[Pig Hogger (10379)]

So a tiny bit of water has to be dripped into the drain to keep up with evaporation. There are special "drip valves" for this.

I was surprised to see, in a large warehouse store, some automatic urinal flush reservoirs (they flush the toilets every so often) whose output was hooked to about 30 small half-inch pipes going into the floor. The reservoirs were installed about 20 feet high on columns.

Some amount of cogitation was needed to realize that each of those small pipes was headed to the traps of the floor drains installed throughout the store...

Now that's a (plumbing) hack in the true meaning of the term!

Re:the U-Bend

[Hoi Polloi (522990)]

Slashdot, where you can not only learn about the gory details of OS kernels and hardware but also the nitty-gritty on plumbing!

Re:the U-Bend

[ozbird (127571)]

Fill the trap with cooking oil - it will stop the smell and will not evaporate as quickly as water would.

Please don't. It's a hassle to remove in the sewage treatment works, and can solidify into a oil/water goo that clogs the pipes.

Instead, simply fit the plug or cover the drain - it keeps the smell out, and reduces evaporation. (If fitting the plug might cause the sink to overflow due to a dripping tap, you probably don't have an evaporation problem.)

Re:the U-Bend

[winnabago (949419)]

No need to fill it, a few drops are enough. Oil floats on water, it spreads and forms a thin film on the surface. You get a lid that efficiently prevents water evaporation.

This is starting to sound like the introduction for the most boring Mythbusters ever.

"And then we waited for several weeks, comparing the rate of evaporation to our control toilet...."

Re:the U-Bend AKA trap

[un1xl0ser (575642)]

Can we please put the 'itsatrap' tag to good use folks?

Re:the U-Bend

[qwijibo (101731)]

I'm glad you don't design server rooms I use. You've solved one problem while introducing various others based on a single superstitious belief.

Air conditioners are a common feature in server rooms. The ones used in this context maintain a certain humidity level. If the humidity is too high, there's risk of damage to the hardware, if it's too low it's easier for static to build up, which is bad for the hardware. When the humidity is too high, the air conditioners remove water from the air. This water needs to go somewhere, so a drain is a good choice. If the humidity is too low, they need a supply of water, for which tap water is sufficient.

Drains are also a common feature in server rooms because if water does get in there, they do not want to have the room flooded.

300 wires with a conduit sawed off

[plover (150551)]

Back in the '80s we had a brand new computer room that had 300 shielded twisted pairs heading to 300 distant stations. The entire place was shiny, painted white, beautifully installed, all running through three large plastic conduits, one to each floor, hung professionally from the ceiling. A textbook illustration of beautiful wiring.

The fire marshall came in and said "you can't have those low-voltage wires run through that conduit, that conduit is designed for high voltage wiring." So the electricians came in and sawed off their beautiful conduits, leaving the wires draped between the four-foot-spaced supports. They tie-wrapped the bundles every foot or two, but it still looked like a dead python hanging between branches.

To this day I still can't fathom what the hell that inspector was thinking.

Re:300 wires with a conduit sawed off

[ars (79600)]

You have it backwards.

The problem is not the low voltage cable - it's that since it's meant for high voltage cable someone could install some later not realizing that there is some low voltage stuff there.

Yes, there really is a code about that - not mixing high and low voltage in the same conduit.

You can, I guess, claim that the conduit is "low voltage". But if it looks like it's for high voltage you might not get away with that.

Re:300 wires with a conduit sawed off

[AJWM (19027)]

The fire marshall was (giving the benefit of the doubt) probably thinking that if there was a high voltage conduit, sooner or later somebody would run a high voltage cable through it. Can't have high and low voltage wiring in the same conduit.

(Of course the reasons for all this are probably lost in the mists of time going back to fabric-insulated wires hung on insulators nailed to the studs. You'd think with modern wiring with obvious differences between 12 ga high voltage cable and cat-5e wires it wouldn't matter ... but then I've seen some pretty bizarre wiring setups that were "just temporary" or quick hacks, I can just see somebody provide a whole new meaning to "power over ethernet".)

Re:300 wires with a conduit sawed off

[Dibblah (645750)]

No, there is a good reason behind this.

A transformer is basically two lengths of wire running alongside each other for a long distance. If you run a low voltage circuit next to mains cable, you can potentially (in the case of a loop) create dangerous inductive heating in the low voltage cable - Not to mention the problems of the induced voltage in whatever equipment is connected to it.

Re:Sodomized service

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

At my former job we used fibre cable under major roads to link CCTV cameras to our control room environment. One day a road worker drilled down into the road with some sort of hole digger and wrapped 100 metres of fibre around his machine, exactly like rolling pasta around a fork.

Dungeon radio

[Centurix (249778)]

I worked at one place where our room was a couple of floors underground (very depressing place) and we wanted to listen to the cricket on the radio (pre internet days). Armed with a crappy radio we found we could get perfect reception by connecting to the air conditioning vents with a set of crocodile clips purchased from Tandy's.

Another one I remember is something low-tec invented by some admin staff, we had a policy set in place that locked workstations after 5 minutes of activity, the PC's were severely locked down so you couldn't change this. Turned out the admin section of the company despised this as they would do something on their accounts package, talk to someone on the phone and by the time the phone call had ended the PC had locked itself requiring their password to unlock it. One lady actually took a small clock, took the plastic front off and attached a piece of paper to the second hand, when she wasn't doing anything, she placed the mouse in front of the clock so that when the second hand went past, it moved the mouse slightly stopping it from locking. When the guys in tech support found it, she was visited by practically every IT person just to see it in action.

Re:Dungeon radio

[ShaunC (203807)]

we had a policy set in place that locked workstations after 5 minutes of activity

And the PHB's wondered why productivity was in the toilet... :)

TV in disguise

[smurfsurf (892933)]

I and a few guys were doing customer phone support in a remote building (ten years ago or such some). Soccer euro cup was up, and a collegue was desperate to find a way to watch the games, as the company (ISP) has just started operation, and callers were few and knowledable (so it was actually fun). Opening the cable funnel, he saw a TV cable. He spliced it up and connected it to a RJ45 jack. He then installed a TV tuner card into his PC, build a network cable look-alike to connect the TV card to the fake network jack, and voila - you could not see he was tapping the TV signal (the cable funnel was very visible, the computer was under the desk).

As we left the building about a year later, the fake jack was left there. I wonder what kind of head scratching this caused for the future tenants :-)

Re:Dungeon radio

[lightyear4 (852813)]

Speaking of radio:

A few months back during the summer, I was enjoying the lovely AC of a rather large server room at my university. On top of a rack in the midst of the farm sat a much abused radio, likely discarded even by the janitors, splattered with paint, and employing a rather frightening extension to its antenna. Its tuner was taped into position, and its headphone jack was connected to one of the machines.

This, of course, supplies the world with a live stream of the campus radio station.

Coat Hangers

[tymbow (725036)]

I've seen untwisted coat hangers covered in electrical tape and twisted together used to supply AC between two buildings in tropical weather in PNG. The wiring to the main building was bad enough but using coat hangers to supply power to the small hut that housed the computer equipment was priceless. I should also point out that they did not have power outlets for the computers either. They just cut the plugs off, stripped the wires, twisted them together and covered it in electrical tape.

Re:Coat Hangers

[BigBlockMopar (191202)]

The wiring to the main building was bad enough but using coat hangers to supply power to the small hut that housed the computer equipment was priceless.

Far East, right? For some reason, they have the same cultural aversion to proper wiring as Middle Easterners have to proper plumbing. [shaking head in belief but oh-my-God-what-can-you-do. At Home Depot, they refuse to sell stuff which the "associate" thinks will be used improperly where customer safety might be compromised. "No sir, 18-gauge lamp cord is not suitable to feed your dryer... Yes, it will generate heat, but I can guarantee it won't be in your dryer... 8/3 by code in Ontario.... Yes, I know it's more expensive, copper is a precious metal.... No, I will not cut you 18/2.... Sir, the building codes in Taiwan are highly suspect already, we've all seen in the news how many "modern" buildings collapsed last time you had a 6.1 quake; this is what ONTARIO requires.... well sir, you're more than welcome to take it up with the store manager, here's my phone, I'll dial 831 for you right now.... Oh, he met with you, laughed at you, and told you we wouldn't sell it to you? Yes, sir, that's why I like working at Home Depot, I know I tried to protect the little children in that house from burning up because you're an uncircumcised philistine. Have an adequate day."]

Moderators: If you don't believe me, Home Depot is hiring. After a week there, you WILL believe. Two years of home-built bidets using kitchen sink side-sprayers (note 1: kitchen sink side sprayers are controlled by the faucet, and it's assumed you're always there when they're on. note 2: kitchen sink side sprayers are rated only for the 5-10 PSI or so they see from aerator/diverter back pressure, not the full 50-75PSI of municipal water pressure) attached to municipal water pressure ("Why it burst? You sold me defective sprayer! What you mean I connect direct to city water? I cannot eh-do that, is connect straight to toilet. I come back from tree week in Yemen and find flood and notice taped to door. Now out $142,000 in flood damage to condo units beneath me! Insurance said I not use right part, they not pay! You pay! You pay!"). Two years of stoves burning through lamp cords ("why do I have to change my stove cord every time my wife uses more than one burner at once?"). Two years of actually having to work to convince people who *tell me they're plumbers* (ie. a guy who scraped together enough beer money to buy a pickup truck and a hammer and who now thinks he's a plumber - a trade which requires at least 5 years of schooling, people! Only 3 more to become a doctor!) that they can't use vinyl tubing to connect natural gas on a water heater for a little old lady who is dumb enough to let him into her house!

Find "Holmes on Homes". Shareaza, Torrents, etc. Download and watch a few episodes.

Jesus fucking wept.

Coathangers? I haven't seen them, but I'm a fervent believer.

...it really is the answer

[techno-vampire (666512)]

About ten years ago, I was working for what was then a small, startup ISP doing tech support. For about the first two years I was there, we often had to talk new customers through locking down their modems to 2400 baud in the registration/installation program, because that server often worked best at low speeds. (We also showed them how to reset it to the proper speed afterwards because our POPs were just fine.) I later found out that this was because whoever set up our one and only (at that time) registration server had multiplexed 42 modems through one COM port.

Re:...it really is the answer

[AbRASiON (589899)]

This reminds me of working for an ISP in Melbourne about 5 years back.

My tech knowledge is a bit rusty but if I recall we had a fairly bad firmware on our dial in modems / boxes which caused the winmodems to disconnect a lot (I know they sucked 7 -> 10 years ago but most ISP's seemed ok with winmodems 5 years back)
Anyhow I got tired of dealing with angry customers trying to get a reliable connection with their winmodems so I gave them a string which forced the modems to connect at 33.6 baud instead of 56k, I then set the string to report the PORT speed and not the modem handshake speed and bobs your uncle! Customers loved me "He got me a 57600 connection!" all the time.

Be damned if I recall the string but I think it started with AT....

Seal it up

[crossmr (957846)]

I had an instructor who used to work in industry. He'd told me about a company he was consulting for. They had a Novell box that they administered remotely. During some remodeling, the small closet/room it was in was sealed with drywall. It was 4 years before the box required maintenance and someone went about trying to find it and realized what had happened.

Re:Seal it up

[Scarletdown (886459)]

During some remodeling, the small closet/room it was in was sealed with drywall. It was 4 years before the box required maintenance and someone went about trying to find it and realized what had happened.

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012 [techweb.com]

Re:http://bash.org/?5273

[Gordonjcp (186804)]

Been there, done that while running a small hosting company out of a friend's flat. All the servers were in the living room. We'd borrowed a (for the time) fairly meaty PII-350 to act as DNS and database server. Then we bought another machine, went to give the borrowed PII back and - we'd *lost* it! Where TF was it? We could ping it, it was working and serving up requests, but we couldn't find it. So we ran

find(1)

until we heard the disk rattling. It was under a pile of jackets behind the sofa.

Analog e-mail.

[by Anonymous Coward]

When I got hired as an Information Specialist for one of the government sponsored agencies in Hellinois, the people there would write their e-mails on a piece of paper and give those to their previous IT guy. He would then type them up and send them out via a yahoo e-mail. No kidding.

long ping next door

[darkonc (47285)]

We shared our internet with the small ISP who sublet a portion of the building from us. They were upgrading their connection to the backbone from a T1 to a microwave link (gives you an idea as to how long ago this was).

At one point, they had changed their routing so that they were using the new link but we hadn't, so we decided to see how a ping went.

A packet between the two machines would go through our router, over the ethernet that the two companies shared, out the (old) external router, and down the coast through Seattle, to California, then back up the coast to Vancouver, and then finally over the same shared ethernet cable that the packet had originally gone out before finally connecting to their router.

A cross-border round trip of a few thousand miles for a net distance of about 60 feet.

Oh, and did I mention that our server room was a converted bank vault?

Honorable Mention

[ShaunC (203807)]

I know the poster was looking for funny/interesting anecdotes directly from our community, but for those of you who haven't stumbled across The Daily WTF [thedailywtf.com], hop on over to that site and make it a part of your daily reading. While the focus used to be mostly on programming, it's abstracted itself to the generic IT level in recent months, and you'll see all sorts of bizarre stories there.

The Daily WTF is to IT workers what Jerry Springer is to everyone else. Just when you think you're having a bad day and your life is in the crapper, you can take a few minutes to soak in a situation where somebody else has it much, much worse... :)

Phone cables from modems

[lexarius (560925)]

I wanted to try out the option to have the server page me in case of problems. Only problem was that the only phone jack in the server room was on the other side of the room, and I didn't have a phone cable nearly that long. But I did have a box of old ISA modems and short phone cables. My intuition told me that the "Line In" ports were wired directly to the "Phone" ports and didn't require power or actual computers to drive them. So I daisy chained modem cards and short cables together across the ceiling, wedging the actual cards behind cable housing and drop ceiling tiles, until finally I got dialtone. My supervisor commended me for my creativity but made me take it down, since the policy was that the modems were not to be connected to phone lines for fear of people being able to dial in to them or something. Never mind the dedicated internet connection.

Re:Phone cables from modems

[Anml4ixoye (264762)]

You reminded me of the time our network admin wanted to setup a failover for our main (high-traffic) website. He figured that he could just add the IP address of our off-site emergency server as a third entry in DNS, since (at least to him) DNS worked by always hitting the first IP, and only moving down the list if it couldn't hit the previous one.

Only it doesn't. It round-robined the requests, so 1/3rd of our traffic was immediately and swiftly rerouted to our emergency site, which some enterprising webmaster had setup to email the webmaster box if anyone hit it (to make sure, I guess, that no one was going to it).

We noticed it because 5 emails came in at once, and then 10 more, and then it didn't stop until Groupwise crashed. We lost all the email in the box, and emails were coming in at some insane rate. We figured it out maybe 3 minutes in, but by the time we logged in and made the change, it was way too late.

Re:Phone cables from modems

[sydb (176695)]

Sorry, can't tell whether your story is about the incompetent admin and his DNS "hack" or the Groupwise server which loses all your mail when it gets full. Either way it's good, though.

Re:Bedlam DL3

[z0idberg (888892)]

That link just screams NSFW.

My direct experience...

[rah1420 (234198)]

I was the "computer guy" at a fabric processor in a town in Eastern PA that Shall Remain Nameless. Being "The computer guy" meant that they blamed me for the outages, but of course gave me no spending authority to do anything to fix the problems...

About 1 month into the gig, I was in the front office which was connected to the computer room by fiber optic cable (probably the smartest thing this company did.) However, once the fiber terminated at the switch in the office, the horizontal wiring to the workstations was, God help me, silver satin cable. Telephone wire. The shit was everywhere. There were about 100 workstations salted through the plant (which ran high voltage AC and heaters and whatnot) and everyone complained about the server performance. I wasn't even allowed (!) to put a network analyzer on the wire and was too naive/stupid at the time to realize what the problem was. The guy who had the spend authority, the "chief engineer," told me the problem was lack of RAM in the server and was always harping on me to upgrade the memory.

Another time I opened a closet to find a splice of this satin cable (they must have bought it surplus, they had hundreds of reels of the stuff) and the splice was made with, I kid you not, wire nuts.

I lasted 18 months there. I heard they brought an ex-Accenture conslutant in soon after to fix the "computer problems" and she ran the company into the ground.

Unsynchronized air conditioners

[Animats (122034)]

Many computer rooms have packaged units which both heat and cool, and some also both humidify and dehumidify. That's fine if you only have one. If you have more than one, they need to be interlocked so you don't get one cooling while another is heating, or one humidifying while another is dehumidifying. If you get into that situation, everything will seem to be just fine, but your energy bills will be maybe 5x what they should be.

Saw that situation in a server room at Stanford a few years ago.

Stupid IT maneuvers

[ximenes (10)]

I have a bunch of stupid cobbled together setups to talk about. It all comes from a combination of poor IT staff at university wages, infintessimal budgets and the overbearing institutional and faculty pressures.

1. A "server room" that was essentially the most worthless room in the entire building, a long skinny room with four windows (perfect for keeping an uneven temperature!). Rather than buy 19" racks or even wire racks, they found a bunch of tables and put one server on each all the way around the edge of the room.
1.a. All of the servers were in fact desktop systems; an Ultra 1 was the mail server, a SPARCstation 5 the print server, a Gateway Pentium Pro 200 desktop the web server, etc.

2. A lab had to be moved one room over, because its current location was deemed too valuable. The original room was designed for a lab, it had 20+ fiber optic networking ports, twist-lock power connections in the ceiling, that sort of thing. The new room had two electrical outlets, no dropped ceiling, and one fiber optic networking port. It had previously been used as a copy room/storage closet. The cost to move the fiber optic wiring (just one room over mind you!) was over $25,000.

So instead, I had the great idea to cut a hole in the common wall (above the drop ceiling line), purchase additional ceiling tiles and cut up 2x4's into wooden supports. The original ceiling boxes containing the networking were put on top of the blocks above the new tiles, and extension cables run through the wall into the new room. In the original room, which was turned into a lounge, you couldn't tell that there was anything funny going on.

The best part is that the lab manager, who insisted they needed every single network port, never used a single one of them in the new room. All of those cables now reside in a box marked "Giant waste of money".

3. The main Windows file server was purchased in 2002 and has an internal RAID (bad idea in my opinion). What was huge then is worthless now; 5 disks that total 135GB. To get more space, the administration begged for a single external 250GB USB drive to host all user data. Nevermind that there is no redundancy, that an external drive is more suspectible to theft or failure, and that USB is unnecessarily slowing things down.

4. A system administrator got it into his head that rackmounting was the way to go (I agree). So he begged for a 19" rack to be ordered, and placed all of his servers into it. Except he doesn't have a single rack mountable server, and he didn't get the rails for any of the cases either. So now he has one $500 rack, and 8 $100 shelves to go in it. Same guy also switched the KVM monitor to a 15" LCD that doesn't support the resolutions of 9 out of 10 systems connected to it.

5. A consultant was brought in to tell us what needed to be done with the computing infrastructure (what DOESN'T need to be done is more the question). His main suggestion was to set up a central backup service just for this college, so as to avoid paying the central university IT group fees to use their central service. OK, thats an idea I guess... except that he wanted us to buy this: http://www.sun.com/storagetek/tape_storage/tape_li braries/sl8500/ [sun.com] (its $200,000). Luckily this one didn't actually come to pass.

Basically every day is a new adventure in ridiculous IT methodology.

2 SUNs == remote control

[darkonc (47285)]

With our company was based in Vancouver, we determined that we could get much better bandwidth charges in Seattle, so most of our live servers were there. Two of our larger machines were SUN 450 boxes (bought because, back then, Oracle didn't have full support for Linux). After I set them up, we pulled out the graphics cards that they came with and shipped the cards and monitors back the Vancouver (they were part of the bundle). Then I connected the two machines with null modem cables, Port A - Port B. and Port B to Port A.

Once the graphics cards were removed, the machines defaulted to booting with Serial consoles. This meant that if anything went seriously wrong, just about anything other than hardware maintenance could be done by SSHing to machine X and using a terminal program to connect to the console port of machine Y (or vice versa).
This included the ability to do a complete wipe and install, needing only to instruct the CoLo staff to insert the install CD (which were left on top of the machines) into the appropriate box.

One of the monitors ended up on my desk. I can't remember who got the other one.

Redneck Network Alarms

[mkcmkc (197982)]

A Very Large Telecom Corp(TM) had let a contract for a hardware subsystem that was to be connected to their very expensive network monitoring system (probably HP Openview). Anyway, the vendor couldn't quit make this work. So, to satisfy the contract, they had a tape monkey with a laptop in the NOC. Whenever an event happened on the subsystem, he'd manually copy the message into a dialog box on the master monitoring system, at which point it'd pop up on the regular NOC alarm system...

Sprinklers from hell

[plopez (54068)]

This happened just this past year.

We had moved into larger building with a server room in the basemnent (cue ominous music).

We rapidly began to run out of space so decided to place the chief sysape in the basement near the servers, which made sense. We cleaned up some items in the basement, moved them into storage, carpeted, dry walled etc. Since it was in the basement it needed an egress window with a steel casing and ladder. This actually turned the office into a nice garden level. You could look out the window and watch the sprinklers, see trees and grass etc.

On day, the chief sysape comes in and notices water on the floor. He looks over at the egress window and there is about 2 feet of water collected in the base of the exit well.

Well, they shut down the water to the entire building. Luckily the server room actually had about an 18 inch raised floor, so no damage.

To make a long story short, upon investigation it turned out that when the sprinkler system was installed, instead of capping off the ends of the plastic piping, they folded it over and crimped it. They relied on the mass of the dirt to keep the ends crimped, and for years it worked. Until the egress well was installed and the dirt was disturbed. Once it was disturbed, the crimps began to fail under water pressure. Leading to a near IT disaster.

Space Station Video Hack

[cyclone96 (129449)]

If you've ever seen TV coverage of a Progress or Soyuz docking to the International Space Station, you've probably seen the ubiquitous black and white docking camera video with data overlayed on it as the vehicle approached the docking target.

Unfortunately, this television signal was only within the Russian Segment, and could only be downlinked through Russian communication assets over Russian ground sites. That limited the video to around 10 minutes each orbit, and required the docking to physically occur over Russia.

The US segment downlinks television via the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS), which have more or less worldwide coverage. But the US segment and Russian Segment systems used incompatible video standards and weren't physically connected.

Yup, two video systems that cost tens of millions to develop, and they can't talk to each other. Classic "square peg, round hole" problem.

So we devised a setup where the crew ran a cable from the Russian Segment TV system into an IBM A31p laptop which converts the Russian SECAM signal to US NTSC video. The output from the laptop is connected to another cable strung down the stack into the US video system and downlinked via TDRS. Voila, greatly increased video coverage thanks to a lowly Thinkpad.

Details of this being tested can be found here: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=18791 [spaceref.com]

Booting a PDP11 with no boot ROMs

[Gordonjcp (186804)]

I have a PDP-11/73 that I run occasionally (http://pdp11.kicks-ass.net). It's got about 70M of disk space, two 10M removable drives, and two 8" floppies. All of these are (or were) booted by typing the name of the boot device you want at the boot prompt. Now, for those of you who have only ever seen modern PCs, these machines don't necessarily have any kind of BIOS or anything like that. In this case, the boot loaders were held in a pair of EPROMs on an add-in board along with the console serial port and LTC (line time clock that uses a small transformer to provide a mains-derived 50Hz clocked interrupt). One day, one of these EPROMs failed. No boot image. "Oh dear", I said, or something very similar.

Well now, remember I said it had no BIOS? What it *does* have is an octal debugger, similar to DEBUG in MS-DOS, called ODT. This is actually built into the microcode of the CPU; the CPU requires a console serial port to be present to even POST. If it's not there, a little LED lights on the edge of the CPU board and the machine will never come out of halt. So, at worst, all you need to do is hit <BREAK> type in the boot loader code on the terminal, and the machine will boot. Right?

Right. But that's a pain in the gluteus maximus, because it means typing in a load of stuff like

@001000/012700^J
  001002/174400^J
  001004/012760^J
...

and so on for a few dozen lines. There must be an easier way. What, like burn them into an EPROM? Well yes, but I don't have an EPROM burner. What I *do* have, though, is a VT-510 terminal, which allows you to program key sequences into the function keys. So, what I do now is power up the terminal and the PDP11, press HALT and then RESET on the front panel, hit a key sequence on the terminal, drop back into RUN once the disk seeks (controller is ready) and it's booted.

Yes, I'm buying an EPROM blower off eBay...

VHS backups

[jdfox (74524)]

I used to be the internal LAN support at a large multinational hardware vendor. Most of the company was on Mac desktops and Unix servers, but the accounts department felt they were mavericks who could run their own IT, so they opted for DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 and a Netware server. OK guys, if you think you can do it better, then maybe you can. Go for it.

They also figured that server backups were probably a good idea, since they routinely handled millions of pounds of transactions per day in that one office alone.

And since they were accountants, they naturally picked the cheapest backup solution they could dig up, which was a 40-dollar backup box that used VHS video cassettes, underneath a beancounter's desk, right by his foot. I shit you not: every few weeks, it would occur to him that a backup hadn't been done in a while, so he'd shove the VHS cassette into the backup box with his foot, then nudge the start button with his foot, and return to counting beans. The cassette would pop out when it was finished, and that was proof positive for them of a job done properly. They never even bought a second VHS cassette. Amazingly, the thing never stretched to snapping point, but it was undoubtedly unusable for restores (it never occurred to them to do test restores), making it genuinely much, much worse than useless.

At the office on the other side of town was the accounts department for another division. They also used VHS backups, but felt that doing backups was a bit beneath them really, so instead they had the office cleaner shove the VHS cassette into the 40-dollar backup box next to the office door every night on her way out. One night she was home with the flu, and hadn't left instructions for her replacement to do the "backup". Sure enough, the server crashed that night, and the stale backup wouldn't restore. The poor cleaner was immediately fired, but not the asshats who delegated mission-critical IT chores to a cleaner, on dimestore reject equipment.

I felt duty-bound to tell these fucking morons that they were really making a false savings on backup equipment, and needed to buy real backup gear, with someone trained to monitor the state of the scheduled nightly backups and do scheduled test-restores. This company was pulling in 13 billion US dollars in revenue a year, so 1500 dollars for an internal tape drive and a copy of Cheyenne to protect hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data sounded like a pretty unbeatable deal to me.

Not to them though. "You IT people", quoth a senior beancounter, shaking his head, when I took the purchase requisition to his desk for signature. "It's always more money for the latest damn thing, isn't it."

Cheapest of all would have been for them to simply use the central Unix servers, which were run properly with tested and reliable disaster recovery by experienced sysadmins. I tried explaining that there'd be no change to their DOS PCs, and they'd still have the same F: G: and H: drives, with no visible change to their working environment. I even offered to pay for the new client software. They'd save money, and get vastly better care of precious data.

The reply: "Heh heh heh! And then next year there'll be some reason why we all have to get rid of 1-2-3. And after that there'll be some reason why we have to get rid of DOS. No thanks! Heh heh heh! You guys never quit, do you!"

The Curious Case of the Magic SCSI Clock

[jolyonr (560227)]

A while ago I ran an Amiga software development company. Our designer (Mark) had an Amiga 4000 with various external SCSI devices running off a notoriously unreliable Commodore A4091 SCSI card.

I went to his desk once trying to access a file on his external drives, and I kept getting disk errors. I called him over, and he said "Oh! That disk won't work unless you open up the system clock and resize it to this kind of size, and put it on the screen here". He opened the old analogue-face clock program that came with the amiga, resized it to about 200 pixels square, and stuck it in the top right of his screen.

I stood there smiling. He was, after all, a designer.

The file opened fine though after he did that.

I did some messing around on his machine afterwards. I was convinced there was some kind of obscure problem that we were missing - incorrect termination or bad cables maybe. I put the clock incident down to coincidence.

I could find nothing else wrong - but I still couldn't access the disk. So, I opened the clock application. I tried it on one side of the screen. File would not open. Moved it to the top right corner. The file opened. I did this about ten times as I couldn't believe the results myself. Every time I had the clock in the top right corner, the external SCSI disk behaved itself. I tried different applications, none of them worked in the same way - it had to be the clock.

I was completely spooked by the whole thing, and decided this was something sent by the Gods of SCSI to taunt me. The logical side of my mind believes that it is probably some obscure DMA issue, the rest of my mind believes the machine was possessed.

The thing I was never able to figure out was how Mark discovered the SCSI-healing properties of the Magic Amiga Clock and why he felt it was perfectly normal behaviour for his machine!

Jolyon

Where do I start...

[Linker3000 (626634)]

1) The computer room floor built with a 4 foot void rather than 4 inches because the builder read the plans wrong. Mid you, there was room for a lot of kit in this 'split level' computer room.

2) The Netware 3.x file server which was a Toshiba T3200 plasma screen laptop locked inside a filing cabinet (a very secure solution on a military base). While I was working on it, a telephone began to ring in the next drawer up. I mentioned this to someone as nobody seemed to have heard it and the reply was "Oh, we don't answer that one"

3) The Olivetti M24 (AT&T 6300) that lived in a milking shed in the middle of a dusty field that eventually died and had to have a 2-3 inch layer of 'field' vacuumed out.

4) The computer room built with the existing radiators walled in but not turned off - took ages for the aircon guys to figure out why the room never cooled to the calculated temp.

5) The installation test of a new halon system (with a cylinder of CO2) where the engineers had not properly screwed the nozzle onto the 'j' pipe in the centre of the room. When the system was fired, the nozzle shot through the false ceiling, the gas followed it and the pressure blew down all the ceiling ties - the computer room looked like a scene from Die Hard.

6) The school network that comprised 5+ 'backbones' of 10Base2, each with around 20-30 D-Link *hubs* wired directly to cat5 outlets. Netware servers strategically placed round the building acted as repeaters with 2-3 NICs in each. We also found some Cat4 cable buried directly into the walls (no trunking).

7) 140m of Ethernet coax buried below a school field to link two buildings.

8) The over-length Token Ring network that included specially designed and developed repeaters that had to be 'tuned' using a screwdriver to adjust variable resistors to get the timing 'just right' so that the whole thing worked.

I have to add that I was *always* the support person brought in to sort things out - not the one creating the mess.

It's DNS in France

[Punk Walrus (582794)]

I worked for a HUGE multinational ISP once. We had just gotten France hooked up and they had been running fairly well for about six months after two years of testing. About 100k customers used the service.

One day, DNS went down. This had happened in the UK a lot, so we barked up the wrong tree for hours thinking it was a Keyring issue over the Transatlantic connection. Nope. Hours later, we found the DNS for France was on a different subnet. This led to discovering that their DNS service was on a set of IPs that pointed to one MAC. Finally, the people in charge of the data center said, "That's not our subnet. I don't know where you are getting DNS from.

We traced back and back through routers, entering territory that got scarier and scarier. It went to an older building that were were in the process of closing down and selling. It also had a data center, but that room had been dark for months, and DNS had been working up until now. Back and back we went.

Finally we found that the trace went through a disused subnet through a former office LAN in that building. This traced it back to an office, which traced it back to... ... a 386 LCD laptop. The machine had died because the logs had filled up the 1.2 gb hard drive. We couldn't believe it until someone rebooted the damn thing, and DNS came back up. We had been running production DNS on this thing for over 2 years.

Turns out that when the French network architecture was being set up, they had to transfer DNS somewhere temporarily as part of a testbed, so some guy had an old laptop in his office he just hooked up. Then he was laid off before we went live. Nobody ever switched it back, and since the office space was being abandoned, no one every went into the office to turn anything off, figuring it was somebody else's problem.

A week later, French DNS was running on a production server.

I am impressed it lasted that long on such a platform.

We also used to run the flight schedules for Lufthansa. It was a Windows NT 3.5.1 system that was running on a 486, and was running some proprietary terminal service and scheduler. It crashed once every 31 days (there was some bug where it would crash after xxxx hours which was between 30-31 days). The only way to fix it was to hard reboot the box, and the directions were scary: "Go down to the older server room, and find an unlabeled shelf next to the first door near the panic switch. On the bottom of that shelf is a box which is behind a stack of old 10base hubs. Hold down the power button until the green light goes off. You may have to lie on the floor on your stomach to reach the button. Count to ten, power back on. Make sure the amber light labeled 'turbo' is lit on bootup. If not, repeat, but wait 60 seconds before powering back up."

I sure hope they got that fixed, it was last like that in 2000.

Re:Server room heating & worker Safety

[darkonc (47285)]

At UBC we had a tiny (10'x10' computer room with a number of (un)pleasantly heat-generating computers (a couple of SUNs and a stack of SGI's). We managed to get the extra wiring put in place to handle the machines (a number of which required a 20AMP plug), but we never managed to get extra AC installed. This didn't bother us until summer came. ... and the build-up of heat would occasionaly trip the thermal breakers in some of the machines.

After begging facilities since the previous year to upgrade the AC (and having one last big machine installed), we 'solved' the problem by buying a small, window-type AC, and poking it out the door. With this setup, we could generally get the room to stablize at around 30C (about 86F).

This worked until facilities showed up and complained that we needed to go through them to get any sort of AC installed, and demanding that we stop using the offending unit. (but required us to continue with the un-responsive process of getting the room AC upgraded).

Peter resolved the impass by calling the health and safety group, and keeping the door closed until they arrived the next morning to inspect a worksite with a temperature of over 100F.
The AC was upgraded in well under a week.

Using the heat

[Anomalous Cowbird (539168)]

I have been told that, back in the late 70s or early 80s, when a new courthouse/office building was built in a nearby county, someone got the idea to use the heat generated in the computer room to augment the building's heating system.

As I heard it, during the first winter, the gas company sent inspectors to check the pipelines, test the meters, etc., because they couldn't imagine that a building of that size could use so little gas in the wintertime.

Re:Server room heating & worker Safety

[by Anonymous Coward]

I worked in an office on a Sperry Univac BC7 mini computer. It had a LED panel that displayed certain error messages. I learned how to send messages to the panel. They had air conditioning, but were too cheap to set it to a comfortable level. One day I had a brainstorm while sitting there sweating. I sent "overheat warning" to the panel. I pointed it out to the office manager. He immediately turned the air on.

Re:Bizarre IT setup seen around the country...

[OECD (639690)]

How about the 10 MB email limit? That seemed to show up in the last 5 years or so. Before that I've had success with almost every size attachment I've been sent (and I do printing, so I see some pretty fat files.) When was the meeting held where they decided that?

MS Exchange in place of a mail server

[SgtChaireBourne (457691)]

I've seen people try to use MS Exchange in place of a mail server.

Hey, you did ask.

Re:collision detection?

[LittleBigLui (304739)]

so your interpretation of CSMA/CD = Constant Shouting Might Allow Copying Data