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]

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!

Server room heating

[dtfinch]

Company moved into a new, larger building. The server room had a heating vent leading into it, and no A/C. They solved it by clogging the vent with a bag full of shredded paper and cutting a hole in the wall to install a small consumer single-room air conditioner.

Re:the U-Bend

[TFoo]

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

[Helix150]

running the water at any sort of regular interval will keep the u-bend full. For the U-bend to evaporate would take weeks or months probably. Even the slightest drip should more than counter the evaporation. And it probably seemed like a better solution than a server room which stank up every month for no apparent reason :)

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

[OECD]

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?

Honorable Mention

[ShaunC]

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... :)

Unsynchronized air conditioners

[Animats]

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.

Re:Seal it up

[Scarletdown]

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:Seal it up

[crossmr]

Not the same place, so not the first time it happened. I don't think they had to call in Novell to find it.

Re:the U-Bend

[TykeClone]

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

Re:Router at the end of a pier

[afidel]

Wonder if that was before Cisco offered extended range products. These days you can get gear from Cisco that will survive in the Sahara in a NEMA3(sealed) outdoor enclosure.

Re:collision detection?

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit. IP doesn't do collision detection, so that change wouldn't have helped much at all; moreover, to have no collision detection before that change would have required building your own tranceivers.

Re:the U-Bend

[ozbird]

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:collision detection?

[Tore S B]

Uhm, that's on a completely different layer, buddy. The ethernet card driver itself handles the collisions.

Re:The most messed up LAN, evar!

[Tore S B]

The backbone was a five port AUI concentrator... it was too primitive to be called a hub. (AUI was Sun's insane proprietary ethernet connector.)

It doesn't get more primitive than a hub. It was known as a "fanout unit" back then, though, or some other names. AUI was not Sun proprietary, it was an open standard, and for near a decade was the standard interface between a machine and the physical layer.
a BNC co-ax hub used just to hook up workstations in a star topology... for whatever reason, they decided that ring topology wasn't good enough to string five lightly used workstations together.

Presuming that by "ring" you mean "bus", a hubbed star-wired network is still a bus topology. Possibly they did this for reliability reasons (So that one could not just unplug ones T-joint and bring down the whole BNC loop) but that's just a guess.

Re:the U-Bend

[MadCow42]

Plastic cling-wrap is your friend.... it works wonders on toilets and such, or over sinks where you can't plug the overflow drain as well. It's great for cottages that you seal up for the winter.

Kevin.

Re:the U-Bend

[packeteer]

Vegetable oil will eventually go bad and stink all on its own. Use mineral oil.

Re:Dungeon radio

[clydemaxwell]

Once copying a dying HDD, I had to continually hit 'retry' on the copy operation when it encountered a CRC error. Eventually I just took a heavy wristwatch and placed it on the enter key.

HDD successfully copied!

Re:the U-Bend

[fbjon]

Or you can just pour some cheap cooking oil into it, which will stay there for a long time. Put a sign on top of the drain as a reminder not to flush it out, if someone goes there.

You should also pour some oil into the toilet when traveling, as it will collect on the surface, preventing water from evaporating.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:the U-Bend

[autocracy]

See comments above, but basically large HVAC systems (Lieberts come to mind) having humidifier cycles that pump water into the air, and an air conditioner (or, more simply, heat pump) naturally removes water from the air. That creates circumstances for both incoming water lines and drains.

How 654k with a 640k limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that anyone will ever see this down in AC land, but what the hey...

The 640KB limit wasn't exactly 640KB. You young whippersnappers are probably too young to know about it, and yes, some of the old guys around here outclass with their pdp-11 talk, but it was actually possible to run up nearly 64K beyond the 640K boundary... and to access slightly beyond the 1MB boundary as well -- the area called the HMA High Memory Area, if memory serves.

Remember, DOS used a segmented memory model at the time, two 16-bit words. The high word was the segment address, the low word the byte within the segment. IDR what the segment offset was (four sounds familiar, but IDR whether it was 4KB spacing, or four in the 16-bit=65535=64KB block, so 16KB spacing), but they overlapped, so different overlapping segments could reference the same physical memory location at different byte offset addresses relative to the segment.

The trick to addressing that last bit of memory was to reference the last possible segment in the allowed area (640k or 1M), and then use byte addresses that extended beyond the segment limit. Since the addresses were 16-bit the segments were 65535 bytes or 64KB, and one could access nearly that much space beyond the limit (minus one segment offset) -- with the limitation that it all had to be treated as a single memory block, used by the same memory resident program, since only that last segment could access the entire thing.

DOS had a couple config.sys options at the time, DOS=HMA, and DOS=UMB (which could be combined on a single line as DOS=UMB,HMA). UMB if I remember right allowed DOS to access the area between 640KB and 1MB for TSR (terminate and stay resident, the terminate referred to the initialization) programs, mainly device drivers and the like. HMA referred to the nearly 64KB above 1MB and told DOS to move as much of itself as possible to this segment, leaving only a stub, some 4-16KB IIRC, at the bottom of the 640KB area. The catch was that as I said, only one thing could be in that HMA area and DOS didn't take quite all of it, so if someone had something that could use the area a bit more efficiently, they'd not tell DOS to take the area, but tell this other thing to use it instead.

Anyway, back to the 640KB. 640+64=704KB. As I said, it wasn't /quite/ that as it was a segment offset below that, but I think the segment offsets must have been 4KB as I believe I remember 700KB being the max. Of course, one couldn't use the /entire/ 700KB, as DOS itself took up some of it, and its various memory managers (himem.sys to enable 640-1MB access, another one, 386enh or some such, that managed > 1MB by swapping 64KB segments into a 64KB window in the >640KB area) took up a bit more, and various hardware drivers required a few KB below 640KB or 1MB if they could go above it, and the order they were stuffed into the 640K-1MB area made a difference because some were big during init but then shrank down substantially so they had to go in first while there was still room or they'd end up taking up main memory 640KB area, and... .

Anyway, if one were lucky, and had spent the time learning how to fit the puzzle pieces consisting of all the drivers and other bits in /just/ right, often spending hours on hours doing so, only to have to do it again when a DOS or driver update changed how one or another piece fit or if one upgraded something, one could actually get a bit above 640KB free for use by a real program, tho just getting 640K free was considered quite a feat, almost a miracle. 654KB would have been possible -- just barely, and ONLY if one configured things /just/ right and didn't have any hardware with stubborn drivers. In theory, I think it was possible to do 680KB, but I don't believe I actually ever saw that available.

Of course, back then, configuring the memory and drivers was the easy part. That was before PlugNPray, and just to get things working at all, one had often fought

Re:the U-Bend

[Anonymous Coward]

Viruses. Viruses. Viruses. Viruses.

Where the hell does 'virii' come from? If you must use some bastardised version of latin, why not 'viri'?

Re:the U-Bend

[Secrity]

Almost all of the data centers that I have been in have some number of Liebert air handlers in the server room. All of these Liebert air handlers have an evaporator which requires a drain and most of them have a humidifier that requires a water source.

Re:the U-Bend

[redalien]

I wish people would use viri, it anthropomorphises the little buggers delightfully.

Thicknet?

[Optic7]

Well, I had one place hire me to sort out their IT... they had a weird proprietary wiring system that worked only with weird proprietary network cards and talked only to a weird proprietary server. I've never seen any of this garbage before or since. All the wires were about 1/2" thick and were run along the hallways, because they'd never heard of the idea that you could have wiring *installed*. And the server was down most of the time, they'd actually poke at it once a day until it went up for an hour or so so they could exchange files, before it crashed again.

Sounds like 10Base5 [wikipedia.org] or "Thicknet", which was the original Ethernet cabling spec.

Humid air is a conductor, not insulator...

[Kadin2048]

The one where ambient humidity serves as an insulator and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge, which is a tremendous risk in a room with that many highly charged moving parts.

I realize this is nitpicking (and the rest of your post was right on) but I think you meant to say "where ambient humidity serves as a conductor and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge..."

Higher humidity makes the air a poorer dielectric, meaning that static charges dissipate before they can build up to significant voltages. With dry air, the air is a better insulator, hence higher-voltage static charges. (This is why the kids' trick where you scuff your feet on the carpet, particularly while wearing rubber-footed one-piece jammies, and then shock the beejesus out of someone, only works in the winter.) Naturally, anything that produces sparks -- particularly my favorite, Van de Graaf generators -- work far better in dry air than wet.