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Return Of the Lost Server
buss_error writes: "In today's world of "The server is acting funky, reboot it!" comes this little gem from Techweb." I can totally imagine how it happened as well. Let's hope the dry wall didn't do anything to decrease the life of the machine. *grin*
Very clever :) Now will some moderator see it and mark it Funny, or will they not get it and mark it Flamebait...
DEC's VAX/VMS systems were of course the champ, around about the end of the 5x series. I know of one that got shut down a few months ago after running since 1996 without service... breezed through 2000-1-1 and 2000-2-28 without a hitch. And it gets used by bio scientists, daily, so of course it was horribly admin'd.
Linux is very stable, but it is primarily used as a connectivity box (DNS, HTTP, SMTP, IP routing, yadda yadda yadda) so it gets upgraded a lot for security issues and performance enhancements.
Before the introduction of Novell Directory Services, Netware servers could easily be left running for years. Did it myself for three years once, and I reboot servers occasionally just to test startup sequences. Of course, these old Netware boxen run IPX not TCP/IP... Netware 5 and up run IP so the same comments apply as to linux.
Since NDS, Netware's been quite unstable. However, they've still got the best file protection and access control system - Unix's stone-age rwxrwxrwxs and spotty, poorly integrated ACL mechanisms are laughable by comparison. I think Novell is on the right track technologically; it's too bad open source is going to lap them, once we ditch the insane concept of the root superuser and move to a file system that can support an access control namespace (like reiserfs or Timpanogas).
--Charlie
Use any IP assignment scheme you want, but remember that it's your job to dispense them, not to sit on them.
When I say "I need an IP" I like to hear back, "do you want fries with that?"
In other news, Novell (stock: NOVL) dropped .35 (8%) after the news of a Novell server being found at the University of North Carolina. "We never knew the Novell software could cause the server to run away in the first place," commented one trader. Novell spokespersons tried to explain that the server wasn't lost, merely misplaced, and that there were no problems with the servers operation, however many traders are unwilling to take the risk with the recent recession.
Yeah... if you want to see the intelligence of road crews check this .
As for drywallers? I guess this is a US thing, everything is brick or breezeblock over here.
Hope you ain't in charge of accounts.
The thousand unfunny jokes of KFury I have borne as I best could, but now he ventures upon insult to my intelligence, and I vow revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I would give utterance to a threat with my own account. AT LENGTH I will be avenged; this is a point definitively settled -- but the very definitiveness with which it is resolved precludes the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
Thus I post as an AC, and bide my time.
Right, we wouldn't want the server to starve, or be traumatized for life by being sealed in a small dark place. Imagine the psychological effect on the CPU!
I say we should lobby for the rights of servers everywhere. This is a serious issue! Think of all the server abuse that must go on. I know we've heard the stories. There are at least a few right here on slashdot. And people are so cavalier! It's just sickening! Computers are people too!
...right.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Always play in the sandbox!
--
Talk about hardening a server!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I did Netware up to 3.x, and it was wonderfully stable. I upgraded a bunch of high schools' servers, and the had been been up an average of 3 years without a crash. I was moving them all to newer servers...A couple of the servers died physically when turned off and on again. The ones that had not been up that long had either been downed due to either hardware failure, or power outages longer than the life of their UPS. OS/2 was similarly stable. I ran a BBS on Fidonet for years on OS/2. It was only with the advent of MS-Windows that flakiness has been a common feature of popular computing.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
However, drywall is typically used even inside U.S. homes built of "breezeblock" or other non-standard (for the U.S.) technologies, in order to provide a false wall to run wires and such through. Most Americans don't like seeing bare conduit running across their walls -- clashes with the decor -- and besides, in most places that's against local building codes for new homes (but okay for new businesses -- go figure). And interior walls are always a couple of slabs of drywall slapped onto wood or metal studs (most new U.S. homes use manufactured trusses to span the exterior walls, and thus interior walls are non-load-bearing "curtain" walls -- and built as flimsily and cheaply as local building codes will allow).
The whole point of most U.S. building practices is to build homes as cheaply as possible, while being able to sell them as expensively as possible. Most homes are viewed as disposable temporary commodities, to be discarded and replaced with another one as the family grows or shrinks. This contrasts with some countries where homes are viewed as family legacies, to be retained and maintained over hundreds of years. The U.S. isn't that old, and the U.S. is a very mobile nation, where most of the best and brightest end up moving all over the country in pursuit of the best jobs. So the U.S. has very little recent tradition of home as quality construction. Probably the last time quality housing was built in the U.S. was back at the turn of the 20th century, when all those exquisite Victorian homes and craftsman-era cottages were built. Even new mansions today are slapped together in a way that would have infuriated the European craftsmen who built those Victorian-era homes. Around here in Phoenix, they're nick-named "McMansions" because of their cookie-cutter appearance and slapped-together construction.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
If you don't have a multi-homed host, there is no reason that you should hardcode the IP address on the host.
Instead, hardcode the MAC and the IP address on the DHCP server. It is more work, but you can look in one place and know what is going on.
... was that the powers that be wanted to change everything over to NT. Well, the first thing they had to do was find all these Novell servers. Some were behind desks, wedged between file cabinets, in people's offices under mounds of books and magazines, in closets and yep, one was walled up. They worked. No one had a reason to hunt them down. Now that they've been switched out with NT servers, I'll bet they never lose track of where these NT servers are.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
A few years back a buddy of mine was forced to "upgrade" his network to NT. He found a OS/2 server in a corner (not walled up) that nobody could remember the admin password to. They were able to determin that several people had their "home directory" on that machine.
And tell me, how would you telnet into a Novell box? Especially one that's been running for 4 years straight? (i.e., it's probably running NW3.12 or so, something before 4)
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Maybe they should have done this, put the server in a wall and seal it up, then try to find it. If I recall correctly, the anon server was hidden in some vast server room, but laywers (From CoS, among others) were able to shut it down, due to "copyright" infringement in '96.
It's stuff like this that makes me depressed...
Actually, it's par for the course on real operating systems (OS/400, VMS and suchlike). Netware is rock solid, Linux could learn a thing or two from it.
Ok I don't really know but wouldn't it be funny if its name was something like Poe, after Edgar Alan Poe and the "Cask of the Amontillado sp?."
"What are the three words guaranteed to humiliate men everywhere?
In Republican America phones tap you.
We had several linux boxen in CS, which were rebooted after 319 days for a kernel upgrade - you know that big step between 2.0.x and 2.4?
That's nothing -- Try doing the old a.out to ELF conversion by hand (this was around kernel version 1.2.13 I think)... easily 10x harder to do than libc5 to libc6, but MAN did I learn a lot... like the value of statically linked ln. :-)
Awesome Manowar .sig.
Oh no, it's starting again! They have 24 of our people locked in a movie theater, and they won't release until we apologize. Let's get over with this insanity! Will it never stop???
things. take. time.
I'll bet that there's a couple anceint Linux boxes that I installed in 1995-1996 running 1.0.9 still running somewhere out there. :)
_______
Amen Brother!
I don't know how many times I've had the (dis)pleasure of walking someone through a set of mysterious problems with their Linux box only to find out after 10 minutes that they are running their own custom kernel, and the problems started shortly after.... Bizzare, no?
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Where did you get PC hardware that is this stable? My parents own a 386 that has survived more than 10 years of dayly use. With PC's nowadays, this is unthinkable.
I don't know how it happened, but I woke up in a haze this morning only to discover a wet putty trowel in my bed. My head was spinning, Ignoring it I went to take a pee and my bathroom door was replaced by a wall with bookshelves on it. It must have been a crazy night, and I still have to pee.
And where the hell is the dog?
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Even 5/8 inch (not the standard 1/2) drywall has a 1 hour burn-through time. In Minnesota where I used to live, furnace rooms are required to be wrapped in it.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
A deja-vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix, it happens when they change something.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
It's pretty damn hot right now. (IANANCFVMLGAJIB: I am not a North Carolinian much longer, got a job in Boston.) And it gets worse. Nice place, though... I'd like to move back here in the long-term future.
IAAL,BIANLY
Yeah, basically, that's me. I'm such a huge redneck, in fact, that I've somehow overcome the natural disadvantage of being Cuban. Go home, troll.
IAAL,BIANLY
Only Carolina could manage to interpret "firewall that box off" as "drywall that box off."
/me ducks
/me runs
:)
IAAL,BIANLY
Schroedinbugs!
-30-
Anyway, my particular VP was a specially clueless idiot "Last year I didn't know what a LAN was - now I run it!" - actual quote) who was trying to make points by being as cheap as possible. That meant no spares of *anything*.
Well as invariably happens at the worst moment one of the principal servers for Corporate goes down. Hardware failure, we'll need to buy some parts. Important? Well several hundred folks log in & use it daily for files not to mention the Lotus Cc:Mail database that's on it.
What do we have to use in it's place? Diddly. There is not a free PC that we know of. My group even reviews folks with reasonably fast PCs who might be on vacation - no luck.
Wait, we *do* have a Toshiba Laptop just back from warrenty-repair. It's owner is away for another two weeks & it's a nice one, certiainly faster then many of the crapper desktops we've had to cobble together for ourselves (we were gettoing ready to draw straws to grab one of our desktop PCs...)
Unfortunately the Data Center was not a safe place for a laptop. Hardware walked with regularity, a sweet thing like little Toshie would be gone ASAP. Nobody was even bothering to learn the names of new staffers down there as they rarely lasted a week, sometimes only a single shift before realizing what a mistake they'd made & then walking (yes through some mystery my boss was also in charge of the Data Center.)
What do do?
Well, we threw Netware on our little savior, git it up & on the network, installed the piece-of-^%#^$* backup software we used (did a lovely job of backing up, just couldn't grab the rights - we'd screamed about this but our boss didn't think it an issue.) So we do a quick once-over resetting the rights on the most important dozen or so folks then moved on to the clever part of our plan.
Little Toshie fit neatly *inside* the cavernous hulk of the Everex "Step" server it was replacing. Knocking out a card-bracket slot we could run the network & power cables in through the back & no-one would notice. Yes, "Buddah-Too" would appear hale & hearty while inside the little-laptop-that-could would be the beating-heart of our mighty corporation.
Keyboard we skipped as we could do everything remotely that we might want to for the next few days, plus it meant less chance of the Data Center folks causing problems (they consistanly turned off Netware servers randomly upon hearing rumors of a possible problem - it was impossible to convince them that this was not a good thing & while it worked for DOS it was also why their Win3.x & '95 desktops were always screwed up.)
Anyway little Toshie sat in service for three days. The first day it was up almost all of the files were open but we manually reset most of the rights. A few folks noticed but as they called we'd reset their accounts manually & kept ahead of the curve. Of course when it came time to resuscitate "Buddah-Too" I & another had to pull an overnighter resetting it but the damn things was at least working at 8am the next day & once again IS had secretly saved it's own ass.
Who? Oh yeah, Thomson Financial Services in Boston. Anyone working there still - you inherited an "interesting" place (ask me about the duct-taped hard-drives sometime.) I'm told under a new regime things have gotton better but man they went through a baaad period.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I heard a similar story back in the mid-80s, only that time it was a pair of IBM Series/1s that ran the traffic signaling system for a large chunk of downtown. Downtown where, I don't remember -- New York? Chicago?
Just junk food for thought...
Probably because Google can claim it hasn't exercised any editorial control over the content that's cached -- it's all automatic and hands-off -- whereas Slashdot is very specifically exercising editorial control, deciding what articles get published, and usually making some comment about the content itself. Google can be viewed as simply a conduit forwarding the information, whereas Slashdot would be viewed as republishing the information. A very important distinction.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Now it is spending it retirement days in the basement collecting dust. Robust Compaq servers with Novell 4 has taken its place.
"hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is. "
heh.
digeratus!
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
When I was 12, I was reading H.P. Lovecraft novels, and it made me yawn.
I got scared shitless reading a book some 20 years later, and it was the "San-Antonio" novel, "Faut être logique" (let's be logical). In San-Antonio, there is **ALWAYS** a logical explanation for whatever bizzare happens.
In that case, it was a haunted farmhouse. At night, you'd hear moaning and groaning coming from the walls.
It's the logical explanation that scared me: turns out that a guy was walled-in some 10 years before and left for dead. Turns out he wasn't dead, and he managed to survive all that time by drinking from a dripping water pipe going through where he was, and eating from grain that was leaking from the silo (in France, farmhouses and barns are in the same building).
However, the story didn't say how he managed to shit (and it's not that San-Antonio would not go to those kind of details)...
--
--
--
http://www.snopes2.com/titanic/trapped.htm
--
So, one day, to install a new PBX, we just yanked the CHUBB box out of the way.
Within 2 hours, a CHUBB security patrol car stopped by with a guard & a tech and they demanded access to some junction box or whatever.
Of course, we played the stupids, but did not net the security guard enter our premises; we had to threaten to call the fuzz, though (fortunately, here, these bozos aren't allowed to carry firearms).
Turns out that a bank some 4 blocks from us had it's alarm routed through that box... I guess they had to wait a few days to get new phone lines through...
--
4.x was out and on production machines well before this four year period. The 3.x release that would have been out would be 3.12 at best, which istn y2k compliant, 3.2 is, and thats less than 4 years old.
Of course they could have upgraded the OS while it was in the wall..
-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
That actually happened at the place where I used to work. A Netware box had been running continuously for about three years, but the power supply died one day, and when we tried starting it up again the data drive refused to spin up. The recommendation we got from tech support was to drop the drive from about a foot up and then try and get the data off. Didn't work, of course. I'm sure that support people just make up that sort of thing on the spot...
What in God's name were you doing with your Linux boxes? I ran a machine at my last employer that got an uptime of ~350 days every year for four years. (The reason that it's always 350 days is because they cut the power over the New Year period.) Its job was acting as an internal telnet server providing ssh connectivity to the external network, and serving files to Macintosh/Windows clients. It never crashed, even though it was an SMP box running a 2.0.3x kernel. Admittedly, the NetWare servers were also very stable, but they had the slight problem of being 250-license versions (unlimited license is $$$), meaning that not everyone in the company could actually log in at the same time. Not a problem with free software...
I can't really blame the server. If I were stuck at UNC I'd drywall myself in, too, and pray that no one found me. With no arms or legs, tho
ducks and runs ...
-jdm
[school spirit OFF]
A sailor on an aircraft carrier is trying to figure out how a problematic pipe is routed through the ship. After consulting the blueprints and tracing the pipe, he discovers that it goes through a compartment that doesn't have any doors. A welder is summoned and a hole is cut into the compartment. To everyone's amazement, they discover a fully equipped machine shop that has never been used. The equipment had been installed in the shipyard years before, and confusion over design changes during the construction of the ship led to it being sealed off from the rest of the ship.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
In lecture just this week, a professor was telling us how wonderful the old Sun workstations were. He said that so long as they were running the drives were great, but if you powered them down and let them cool off, it wouldn't spin up again.
He said that the solution was to pop open your case, take the drive out of its mount but leave it connected. Then power on and hit the drive. Supposedly when the drive got cold the viscosity of the oil was too high for the motor to get it going again. You'd loose a sector or two, but if it wasn't the boot sector or root inode the damage usually wasn't too bad.
Admin2: "dood..like...wheres your server?"
Admin1: "DOOD...Wheres my server?"
Admin2: "Man..where is your server ?"
(Apologizes to the people from "Dude, Where's my car?")
I don't think you need to apologize to the people from "Dude, Where's My Car?". I think they need to apologize to us...
c
Somebody made a joke that this Server was Y2k ready. But an old Netware Server from 1997 was most likely not Y2k ready, so could this possible be a falsity?
The expected uptime of a Netware 3.1x box is equal to the min() of the lifetimes of all the bearings (fans and hard disks) in the computer, divided by the number of MSCEs in the company.
Since the old 386 boxes typically had only one fan (in the power supply), they would naturally have greater Netware uptimes than "modern" machines that have more fans (i.e. power supply fan, CPU fan, case fan, maybe others).
Also, due to several factors, faster/newer computers attract more MSCEs. 386s are much safer in this regard.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
mail:~# uptime
3:33pm up 373 days, 1:45, 3 users, load average: 0.32, 0.10, 0.02
mail:~# uname -a
Linux mail.xxxxxxxx.xx 2.0.38 #2 Thu Jan 27 16:40:16 CET 2000 i686 unknown
Last time it rebooted was due to an aircon failure
/Brian
Resistance is not futile - www.gnu.org
Perhaps it was in the "Rack of Amontillado"
In pace requiescat...
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
I used to work for a SCO support branch. SCO Unix or OpenServer is what the majority of our customers were running. :)
It was not uncommon for customers to kill their support contracts because the systems ran for years and years without crashes or reboots, even on plain vanilla PC clones. One relatively extreme example: one day a customer brought in an 8 year old box which had been running Xenix386 since it was purchased. The machine was running custom software for controlling sprinklers in several large greenhouses, as well as accounting and inventory programs, with several VT100's attached. The reason he'd brought it in was that the HD had crashed. The amount of dust in the box was absolutely amazing
Consider that the machine hadn't crashed since it was purchased, and was rebooted only due to UPS problems. The whole livelihood of this guy was tied up in its reliability.
I think this is another testament to the reliability of Unix, even an ancient system like Xenix386 (which is an almost pure v7 derived system).
. . .will they take the movie back ??? It seems to work for the Chinese....
Hardware : Mac Plus
OS : 6.8.3 or so
MacOS, I would give it 10 days.
Depends what it was running. If it was Appleshare, and only Appleshare it would be pretty stable. I ran an MacOS/Appleshare box without rebooting from Oct 1986 to Jan 1991. Five year uptime.
Next time i lose a server i'll be sure to put my ears up against every wall in the buildintg :)
http://www.stileproject.com/pic/?page=pic.html&pi
--
--
RumorsDaily
DOS would freeze up after about a week of INACTIVITY. It would last significantly longer if you used it, but if you didn't.... it would lock, regular as clockwork. The longest I've ever seen an NT box run unattended, was 3.51 for six months. Of course, when I tried to login at the console to resolve "wierd errors", I was told "there is insufficient memory to perform this operation".
Your problem is that your page file is too small. Increase it to several hundred Mb. The system that ran for 6 months had a 1Gb pagefile. You can successfully run for long periods with at least 3-500Mb. Anything less gives you this symptom. I don't know why....
As a former Novell 3.x and 4.x Admin, this is consistent with my experiences. With the exception of a month or so of problems with ver 4.01, waiting for patches for some serious bugs, Novell was the most reliable server I have ever administered. The learning curve to admin the things was a little steep, but then again, it was my first admin experience. They do make a fine product.
*What follows might be OT*
On the drywall issue, my Grandfather was a painter (house and signs) for 40 years. He tells of painting the interiors of a huge tract of new homes.
There were 3 or 4 different floor plans, but within each plan, the houses were identical. He began painting a living room in one house and noted a framed box about 12 inches cubed on the floor and up against the wall. It had been drywalled, taped, textured and sanded - ready to paint, but it's presence was totally different from each of the other houses of that model.
His curiosity got the best of him, and even though the drywall crews would have to come back and redo this area, he went and got a claw hammer to rip the box out. Inside he found the sweepings from the carpenters; sawdust, wood chips, etc. It seems they had swept the trash up against the wall, then framed around it. The drywallers went along with the gag and drywalled and prepped it.
Not a mistake, maybe not laziness, but definitely a good gag. Maybe the carpenters were from MIT?
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
Yup. I worked with a guy that got "caught short" at the top of a couple of stories of scaffolding after a hard night on the Guinness. Rather than climb all the way down and head over to the other side of the site where the bathroom* was, he stuffed some paper in the top breezeblock in the wall next to him and dropped one in. Another layer of paper and Presto! Someone now has a petrified turd in their new wall...
*bathroom - absolutely a misnomer! On this site it consisted of old porcelain toilet placed over an opened sewer cover and surrounded by a curtain! With a hose beside it for manual flushing! (Don't get me started on the f**ker who gave the newbie some fibreglass insulation to wipe with...)
I heard that story too .. about 200 comments back up this thread.
They had to call Novell to help them follow a wire into a wall? I have got to get into consulting.
Slashdotted already.
One of these days, this is going to happen one time too many. You guys really need to start thinking about how linking sites like this affects them.
If this concerns you so much, perhaps you should use your local caching HTTP proxy or hook up with a cache hierarchy.
No screenshot to prove it, but there was a Netware (4.1 i think) server that had ~620 day uptime untill the power went out for so long that it's poor ups gave out. Then about a month later the hard drive started misbehaving, and the machine was finaly replaced with a newer/better/faster/stronger Netware 5.0 dual box.
())_Crayon_))>
what a good quality NOS can do.
.. no doubt about it.
those of you who bash Novell can try and show me a winblows box thats managed to run this long without a SINGLE problem.
When I worked at my old job, we had a server that had been up for 2.5 years without a single problem. Just sat there doing print services, happily. Even ran SAA stuff, which is notoriously unstable.
Novell is the way to go
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Funny thing is, these people are most likely more productive with this setup than they would be with brand new 1.7GHz Pentiums running Windows 2000 or the lastest dist of Redhat.
Why? The most efficient tool is always the one that you know how to use.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
So they didn't think it'd be pertinent to inform their supervisor?
Reminds me of a school I work with - we provide T1 service to them.
One day their link goes down - I get paged immediately, and it looks like the T1 router lost power (which shouldn't happen, as it's got its' own UPS).. The place runs classes over the Internet, so it's important for the link to be up, and the teachers all call and scream at me..
I head down there to find out what's going on, it turns out that their maintenance guy had gone into the room where the T1 was, and heard the UPS beeping, so he turned it off, and decided it wasn't important enough to tell anyone.
Darn. I always had hoped it was true. It's just too good of a story. (I'm a former S2 Systems employee, myself, from back before the Stratus merger with Ascend communications.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I remember hearing a rumor back at my last job about a Stratus VOS machine that the same thing happened to in a bank in South America somewhere. You see, Stratus machines are fault-tolerant, and are intened to be ran for years without ever going down. A nifty feature of it is the ability to virtually partition single machines into fully seperated processing areas called modules. A module can also be on another machine, allowing you to combine multiple Status boxen into a single machine.
Well, this bank was remodelling their computer room when they found the Stratus box chugging along. They actually logged a support call with Stratus technical support to find out what the machine was. It turns out that the machine they had discovered had been module 2 of their production system all along. Apparently it had been buried in the wall several years before and had been forgotten about after some changes in staff over the years. Can you imagine the support call? "Hi, we found this extra machine of ours. What is it?" They'd still been paying maintenance on it the whole time!
I always thought the tale was just an urban legend among Stratus employees. I mean, who would be so stupid as to wall up a quarter of a million dollar machine? Apparently, this kind of thing just happens.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
While rooting around in the bowels of a media company's offices he came across a dusty 386 pushed under a desk. Attaching a monitor to it revealed that it was a Netware 2.12 print server, but while it was connected to the network there were no printers anywhere near it. In the spirit of adventure and tidiness, he decided to shut it down. Almost immediately he got a call telling him that half the network was down. Being a perceptive type, he restarted the 386, and hey presto, the network reappeared. He stuck a sign saying 'DO NOT SWITCH OFF!' on it and pushed it further under the desk.
I think this is how novell plans to stay in business. They'll just hide all the servers behind walls, and then you'll never be able to get rid of them! Microsoft wishes they had that going on!
I used to work at a computer store and we actually had people bring in dead drives to see if they could be recovered (cheaply). About 4 hours in the freezer did the trick for about 75% of those drives! Boot up with a secondary drive and xcopy away... It's neat to see that trick wasn't just local to our store.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I heard this same story as well. It was an aircraft carrier and it was an electrician that was following a circuit through ship that found it. It went into a wall and came out much further down than expected. He showed the forman the plans and where the circuit was. They opened the wall and found the machine shop. This might have been on the Saratoga when it was getting renovated in Philladelphia shipyard in the early 80's.
--Mike
All your drywalled drywalled servers are belong to Novell.
4 years is a long time to go unnoticed. What was the server doing? Whatever it was it can't have been much.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
pfft. Those drywallers probably left Acadia "U" Fizzplant looking for new challenges, after their crowning performance of using a Sun quad-processor board as a wheel chock.
Netware 4 (which it certainly could have been, though v3 is also possible) does come with an app called RCONSOLE for remote access to the server console over the network. However, it's not enabled by default so it would have been impossible to remotely connect to the system if no one had bothered to enable RCONSOLE prior to the system getting walled in. Even if you could connect to it remotely, Netware servers do not eve resemble *nix systems - there's no device file for the console that you echo bell characters to to make the speaker beep (not that the CLI even supports echoing characters to files anyway..). If you really wanted to, though, you could probably write an NLM (Netware Loadable Module) that would write the appropriate data to the speaker's IO port.
Netware 4.1 was out in 1996, 5 years ago. While I don't believe it had an actual telnetd, it did have RCONSOLE - a functional equivalent.
--
A new RFC is needed for IPX Tunneling through drywall.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
This is the type of keyboard that people get really irritated over if they're in the room. :)
It may not actually be older than I, since I turn 19 this month. But it very well might be. :) Certainly older than my siblings.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The network center is now in a small(ish) room with stairs to the left, and a room above it. The NOC used to span that small room, as well as the one above it and down a hall leading from the above room. It was quite larger, with the servers strewn about, amongst parital systems and workshops. Somewhere, throughout the years, as things got moved, one was lost. Supposedly it's still running, but I've not been able to find it by port scanning. The sysadmin says it's still up, however. I suspect that it's either dead, behind a firewall, or not even there in the first place. But at any rate... this type of thing is exceedingly cool. :)
I should find a small server box somewhere and stash it in the ceiling tiles of one of the rooms, off in some dark corner, and put nice air filters on the thing. Possibly steal some rogue cat5, and plug it in. Then, if I ever happen to come back to this school after graduation, I'd come looking for it. :) That... would be awesome.
Almost as awesome as the fact that the keyboard I'm using is older than I am. *shiver*
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Ahh well that explains the mystery light switch in nearly every house I've ever lived in. Ya know the one where you spend hours flipping it on and off while someone runs around looking and listening for an effect but never figure out what it does.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Hey!
I had heard of this too, not sure if it was an urban (naval?) legend or not though. Since I was an electrician, it was said that electricians had found it it while tracing wire... I'm sure if you were a machinist, it would have been a machinist tracing steam lines.
Even without being "y2k" compliant, old Netware 3.x servers are still happy to plod along.
:)
A friend works as an office manager for a small outfit that makes replacement components for the "wear parts" on freight trains. They have a 5v 486dx2 66 running netware 3.11. Drives were duplexed, but one of the SCSI controllers in the array long ago gave out. Now one of the drives that makes up their mirrored "sys:" volume is failing...each time I drop by (153 days since my last visit, according to the server) something new has failed, yet the server admirably continues to perform...all they see is that the system keeps running, so what's up with that computer guy who's hints it may be a good time to consider an upgrade every time he comes by?
They are using AST 486sx33's for their desktop computers, half the time running a train-industry specific software for DOS, the rest of the time in ms windows 3.11, using ms office 4.3 for general "office" stuff. One person was using AccPac (sp?) accounting software for DOS to manage their payroll, etc...
poking around on the console of that old server and looking around at that network is like going back in time almost a decade.
I want to know just how the hell you can inadvertently put up a wall.
It's 9:05. The phone is ringing. You have a trowel in your hand. What do you do?
Wah!
We had an NT 3.51 box running on an Alpha 2100 that was up for 3 years solid. And the only reason it went down was because a drive failed (it was RAID 5) but when we did the drive didn't auto rebuild for some reason, and the array software wasn't installed, so we had to reboot and fix it through the CMOS. Not bad for NT huh? Typical of MS, though. More features, more bugs, more reboots.
Look, I love slashdot and all, but let's face reality here... Slashdot's sub-title should really read:
News for Linux Nerds. Stuff that matters; to Linux Nerds.
When was the last time you saw a slashdot story relating to anything other than *Nix or Windows? And the only reason for the Windows stories is they give the Linux Nerds an opportunity to bash Windows.
I've submitted several OS/2 and OS/400 related stories, and have never had one accepted.
Since Netware != Linux, you are just not going to see many Netware stories on here.
Same for OS/2, OS/400, etc... and God forbid slashdot would post anything about Java, unless it was:
A. a chance to bash Java and/or Sun
or
B. something about Java and Linux.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
If you don't fucking like NC, then I suggest you move the fuck back to wherever you came from. And don't let the door hit you on the ass, on your way out.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Microsoft Windows NT © - not yet compatible with being sealed behind walls.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
uhm. Novel Netware. The story does mention they worked with Novel to find it, and Netware has a reputation for stability.
treke
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
I'd like to apologize to anyone who actually saw that movie.. and.. to the moderators who have to deal with yet another off-topic post :)
We had Netware 3.12 servers that just ran and ran - easily up to 2 years each. The only thing that affected their uptime was the hardware failures caused by them running for so long!
Compare that with the since-replaced-by-Linux NT servers that were rebooted every six months, and the replaced-the-NT-and-Novell Linux servers that were rebooted once every other month (on average).
Netware 3.1x might not be as pretty as NT or as clever as Linux, but for authenticating users and sharing out files/printers, there's still nothing better!
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
If the head actually crashes, dropping it on a hard surface from a height of ~12" will sometimes free the head. If there hasn't been too much damage, you can still use the drive. Usually there are some bad sectors you have to contend with though. I had a drive crash last week and used this method successfully - now it's running like a bubblegum machine.
I write trance music.
We hired a company to run new network cabling last month, and one morning I arrived to find a brand new, free-standing wall 30" wide, floor to ceiling, out in the middle of a room: hey, they needed _someplace_ to put the jacks! (That guy was in and out before any of us showed up at 8:00am.)
Server missing for 4 years found, still ticking
Novell Inc. experts helped IT workers at the University of North Carolina solve the mystery of the missing network server. Though it hadn't missed a packet in four years, nobody knew physically where the machine existed until the joint team followed the clues in the form of the actual physical cable that connected it through a wall that maintenance workers had inadvertently put up, sealing off the server.
--
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Nope, the 2,000+ days-up is true. You're confused by the date at the top, which is the release date of the current version of the kernel. So, this server was running a 8/9/1991 version of Netware 3.11.
This server was at a major midwestern bank that a friend of mine was the Novell sales engineer for. He said on our internal newsgroup that they were so proud of this server not going down that when they needed to move the server from one building to another, they moved it while powered on connected to the UPS.
Granted, a screenshot like this would be extremely easy to fabricate, but I have high confidence that this shot is real.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I work for Novell, and this topic went around an internal mailing list recently, we came up with a couple of good screenshots. These are undoctored screenshots from actual customer servers:
This server was up for 457 days when the shot was taken.
This server was up for 2,174 days when the shot was taken! If your calculator isn't handy that's almost six years!
- Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
No, not novell, you would have had to take it down to upgrade the os from 3x to 4 or 5. If it was 4.x I can easily see it running 4 years without being touched.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
http://www.uptimes.net
Using this site, you can see your Windows machines trail far behind the *nix machines. Yeah, I have one listed here. It's only been booted about twice. Once to add a 2nd nic, and once to move to another location for it's permanent use. It's a Linux box of course.
Our company had a contract to maintain a local governmental network that was, to say the least, convoluted. Designed and implemented by a "talented amateur" who had subsequently left for greener pastures, this network worked well but was a collection of NT, win98, win95 and Unix (HPUX) with sister agencies and their networks thrown into the mix.
When we took the system over there was no map of the network's topography and our people undertook to trace it. Since the LAN extends over 70 miles in one direction (and over microwave) and 35 miles in two others (over landlines) we didn't feel right about expending their money simply driving around to find routers. Instead, when we were on a job in the area, we'd look for the routers, bridges, switches and hubs and put them into a map we kept at the office.
One router, however, defied our attempts to locate it. It was a Cisco and connected a couple of the legs of the wide-area part of their LAN but we never had the time to just go trace wires down to find it.
This outfit fired us last year and has been sifting through networking firms trying to find someone who could make the lan their "talented amateur" left them work right (they never could stand to have the LAN go down even for a moment).
As far as I know the router is still missing. Maybe it's behind a wall. LOL
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Besides the server upgrades, service packs, etc., I find it hard to believe any Windows server has ever run close to four years without a crash.
I wonder if Novell could 'misplace' Bill Gates for four years in a wall...
Give him a cat-5 cable and power and brick him up!
----------
The author's sick and twisted mind
does not endorse any violence that
may be carried out as due to a
suggestion in the above comment.
Remote Console (rconsole??) would work. I used this many a time for admining a NetWare 3.12 WAN some years ago. If I remember right, it beeped on the remote machine even.
I do believe that rconsole would do a system beep from within the NetWare menus on the remote machine. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong - it's been a few years.
While you couldn't get a script to beep every 2 sec, you could always kidnap a journalism major to tap an invalid key every 2 seconds...
I was just discussing with my friend movies that are so "bad" that they go all the way back around into "good". My key point: Beastmaster (the movie, not the horrendous TV show).
(I dont think Dude, where's my car? made it back into "good" though.)
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Actually, NetWare 3.11 had a telnetd NLM, it came with some of their TCP/IP products (NetWare NFS at least). That was available in '93 and probably earlier.
It wasn't multi-user or anything but it gave you remote console from any telnet client.
We used to do the same thing for cheap data recoveries. A can of cold spray could keep the drive going for a while too if the copy wasn't done ...
Someone need to take a few photographs of this room :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I submitted this article yesterday morning but got rejected. Does karma figure into this whole equation?
AussiePenguin
Melbourne, Australia
ICQ 19255837
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
when the clocks were due to tick over (32 bit 1/4 second counters from 1980 or something) on a bunch of Apollo boxes used in the student run open computing facility in 1997, there was talk of whether they should be shut down during the actual turnover. one suggestion was to just bring them down to single user mode, 'cause who knows if a 10 year old hard disk is actually going to start back up. (last I saw of them, they were being used as a bench in the office. I don't see them in the new lab.)
In 1997 some maintenance people put up some drywall.... Little did they know that they had unwittingly sealed up a critical system server behind the wall.... Was this a major concern? The system could not be rebooted incase of system crash! It could not be upgraded! You couldn't change the data in it except over the network! Was this a problem? No, the server ran Novell.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
punching a hole in the firewall.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Hey, finally a real use for my mp3 player :-)
No doubt. The only Novell server my current employer had when I started was a 3.12 server that had been up for about two years. It was a 486 with 64 Mb and the only reason we were afraid to reboot it was the hard drive might not spin back up.
I can easily see this happening. Construction worker(s) are hired to do piecework: "Put a wall from here to there." The computer is in plain site, but the administrator is not, or has already made it clear that he is far "too busy to talk right now." The supervisor (if there is one) or installers say "Screw him, then" and put the wall where they are told, leaving the admin to figure out where his computer went...which he obviously was too busy to get around to (or even notice).
We had several linux boxen in CS, which were rebooted after 319 days for a kernel upgrade - you know that big step between 2.0.x and 2.4?
:)
And they had an almost constant load average of 2 because they were fileservers. Nice beasts, they was
Actually, I heard it was the Ranger, when they shredded it in '93. Our ship was in the yards with them at the time and heard that one, but I always thought it was just a sea story. Considering all of the cool machine shop gear in good condition that we swiped from their distro boxes on the pier, it may not have been BS after all. :)
Deosyne
"I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child."
Amen to that.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Only a Netware server could of gone that long without a reboot.
Can you give a MacOS Version and hardware model?
I had a hell of a time with MacOS 8.5 on an Oldworld g3.
It's running great on linux as a vpn gateway...
:)
Mike
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
"Oh no, I left it in my pocket and my wife washed it! Now all it will serve up is John Katz rants and the frigging G**ts*x page!"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Maybe they walled it up to protect it against having NT installed on it. :-)
bun-fhuinneog agam!
I would have walked them around back to the dumpster and let them have all the access they want. If you owned the building there would be nothing they could do about it.... Oh and mail them a bill for 8 years of closet space rental.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Alternatley some try to make their box blend in with the servers in the wild, ie sticking universtiy property tags on it :)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
If the server was in a state that had cool weather which I believe north carolina does [IANANCL (north carolinan)] most of the year, then the server probably would be at risk of overheating only a few days of the year.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
If you ever want to see how, um, uninformed construction people can be, watch your house being built by a tract builder. You'd be absolutely amazed at the shenanigans that go on. Outlets covered over by drywall (and never to be found again), voids made specifically for ductwork left empty so that they can put the ductwork through bedroom closets instead, plumbing that doesn't quite match up with where the sink is supposed to go, a staircase with not enough steps in it... I could go on. And you know that there's half-full 7-11 cups and spit cans behind your walls.
A running server sheetrocked in? A walk in the park.
DT
--
Is this thing on? Hello?
Worker 1: Hey...what's dat big box looking ting? Worker 2: I dunno... Worker 1: Well we might us well cover it up with drywall, just to be on the safe side...
----------------------------------
Unfortunately, the stability of Novell does no good for you if your servers go down as is the case with the servers that the company that I work for uses.
Oh well, we do the best we can...
KyleI refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
They had been one of the first things packed... All of mom's stuff -- including plants -- sat in the Edmonton winter while they dug for the key rack with the "DO NOT PACK THIS" sign still on it. She was relieved that the plants didn't completely die from the system shock.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
With a setup like that, the installers wouldn't have to ignore any network or power cabling. If they looked into the hole they were patching up, all they'd see would be an 'abandoned' box in the corner (and presume that nobody wanted it).
If it was around a school year boundary, chances are that the old sysadmins are leaving school, and new ones are getting their feet wet. It's also a good time to be doing construction on campus.
The new sysadmin presumes that somebody knows where server #4 is but never gets around to finding it before he leaves. A couple of sysadmins later somebody gets curious.... and slashdot gets called in.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
This would be impossible around here, unless you've got your own generator. Our power was out here just last night for about 45 minutes, and our UPS's last for 15-20 tops - and that was a fairly mild storm.
--
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
*cough* Quickies *cough*
http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/
or, for those adventurous enough to click a link:
http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
We had a small problem at the University I used to work for. A saavy student had stolen a laptop from the library (you can borrow then while in the building) and had set it up with two 802.11 cards and hid the laptop in the ceiling very much so as is explained here. He went on then to wreak all kinds of havoc with his little IP-Masq box until Lucent came in and located it for us (at the time we didn't know how they hell to locate it) The student was caught when they traced the Peer - Peer connection to the second WaveLAN card (he had to be within at least 20 meters of it, or he'd get picked up by the standard base stations)
I'm an AIX Systems administrator, and yes I do cry myself to sleep at night....
What exactly were those construction workers thinking?
Sounds like a good prank to me, the jokers that did it are probably reading the article right now laughing their asses off.
Sounds like a job for underclocking.
P.S. in response to the .sig: Real calculators don't have an "=" key.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
One of these days, this is going to happen one time too many.
Maybe Slashdot could cache these items ala google's approach. It would be especially handy if the link is to something that gets permanently removed.
Since links are often cited without quoting the relevant content, archived articles can lose all context if the site/page is taken down for good.
Just a thought.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
What exactly were those construction workers thinking?
I was wondering about this as well. It's not like people put power outlets inside walls either. Sure, network cables get shoved through walls all the time, so I can see ignoring it while putting up sheetrock, but a power cord?
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Someone apparently never learned grammatical tenses. "Have happened" means "occured in the past." And yes, I am dating a girl who was once, at a point in the indeterminate past, in middle school.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Rule 1: don't whistle when a girl is with her boyfriend. This is probably the least important of the rules, because he's not very likely to be offended. But he might, and it's just not a good risk.
Rule 2: Don't whistle when a girl is with her mother. I mean really, mothers are prudish, easily offended, overly protective of their daughters and often have the know-how to launch harrassment lawsuits.
Rule 3: Don't whistle if she's still in Middle School. That's just sick.
(All three of the above have happened to my girlfriend)
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Sorry - but I don't buy this article. Can you tell me that in 4 years, that there was never a power disruption to that machine? Oh wait - I'm letting my california bias come throught - we're not used to having power for 4 days let alone 4 years.
of course, it's pretty scary to hot-swap those RLL hard drives with the power turned on.
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
But I think the first one is probably most likely.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
What exactly were those construction workers thinking? The machine had to have been on at the time the workers added the drywall (wake-on-LAN wasn't available yet, right?). So they didn't think it'd be pertinent to inform their supervisor? Or wouldn't he have noticed? It's not like they couldn't here it churn and see the pretty lights.
I hope they find out who was responsible for the lab space before the modifications to the room and slap him/her silly. That's exactly the kinda stuff your supposed to prevent! (rolls eyes)
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
When I worked here I had a Netware 3.12 server that had been up for over 800 days. Unfortunately, the server room was small and someone bumped into the front of it at one point and hit the not-disabled reset button. This reset happened while we were removing an huge, ancient toroidial UPS.
maru
If you have ever witnessed the drywall installation process, you would completely understand how this could happen. They drywall over ANYTHING.
maru
When patched to the proper SP level, Netware 3.12 is Y2K compliant. Netware 3.2 was the "commercial" release of 3.12+patches.
maru
"Enter" is where it's at.
--
Nope, no computers here...
You gotta admire their tenacity. They never gave up on that server. It never gave up on them.
It's beautiful.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
there's a cisco router in Vancouver with an uptime of 14 years...
"I was just discussing with my friend movies that are so "bad" that they go all the way back around into "good". "
Its a simple maths problem. When films are made, their badness goes from 0 (good) to 65535 (very bad). Ie an unsigned (16 bit) Int.
Unfortunately, the human brain stores that value in a signed Int, so any really bad film actually registers as good (ie a film with a true badness-rating of 35000 is actually considered `fairly good`).
Of course, genuinely good films get a negative rating. But then, there areny many good films, so this doesnt occur very often.
The server was most likely running Netware since Novell helped them find the server.
Admin1: "uh, Dood ? Where's my server?"
Admin2: "dood..like...wheres your server?"
Admin1: "DOOD...Wheres my server?"
Admin2: "Man..where is your server ?"
(Apologizes to the people from "Dude, Where's my car?")
Where it wouldn't crash for 4 years? My guess is some flavor of Netware, as NOVELL helped them find the server. I can just imagine the call to Novell tech support:
Novell:
"Novell tech support, how can I help you?"
UNC:
"We have a problem with a server...."
Novell:
"What seems to be the problem?"
UNC:
"We can't find our Novell server.."
Novell:
"Ok, first, can you see the montior? Locate the box with the flashing lights..."
UNC:
"No, I mean, we aren't idiots, really...
The server is missing, but it's still serving"
Novell:
"Uh, ok, first you need to do a reboot..."
UNC:
"We can't reboot it, we can't find it"
Novell:
"Well where did you put it ?"
UNC:
"Well, we aren't sure, but it was last seen about 4 years ago"
Novell:
"But it's still working..."
UNC:
"uh, yeah..."
Novell:
"I don't think this is a Novell software problem, and isn't covered under our normal support incidents"
Great sig.
-------
Username taken, please choose another one.
Only if it was asbestos.
-------
Username taken, please choose another one.
At my school and many other colleges, there are lots of poorly locked-down internet terminals in out of the way places. Now, suppose someone was to find a nook in the ceiling in which to stash a box, connect it to the network in the place of an internet terminal (same jack, same IP address), and then have it IP masq the connection to said terminal.
I honestly can't imagine anyone finding out about the thing for years, assuming you don't do anything overly noticible with it. The network would still have the same number of computers using the same IP addresses, and nobody would ever notice that the IP address of the internet terminal has been changed to 10.0.0.2.
I'm not sure how useful this sort of thing would be, but I'm sure most enterprising hackers could find something to do with such a box.
There's a few programmers I haven't seen in years, but they still respond to e-mails. Now I have an idea where to start looking.
We had a client that had a 1780 day uptime on his Netware 3.12 server...When it was time to reboot (because of a scheduled upgrade)...
The server wouldn't boot, upon later investigation, it was determined that a significant percentage of the hard drives bearings had turned to dust!!
This is TRUE story too, saw it with my own eyes... -dm
i doubt 4 years ago they had telnetd for novell.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
We've had Solaris servers that people use daily come to require hardware upgrades or something and no one can remember where the stupid thing is. Everyone is so used to remotely logging onto the machine and performing software upgrades that no one has had to sit at the console for two/three years at a time and pretty soon, unless you keep good notes, no one who works there has ever been to the console at all, just remotely done whatever's necessary. Some of the Linux servers are starting to get into that camp as well lately. Primary router for our company is a RedHat box with a bunch of NICs and it's just been chugging along for two years now and no one's even had to remotely log into it for that time, so even the SysAdmins have quit doing it. The daily scripts run, send the mail saying everything's alright and everybody's happy.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Drywall has a one-hour burn-through rate for each 1/2 inch, so yes, it would qualify as a fire-wall. The effect is reduced by having things like plastic-coated wires passing through the drywall though. Also, it would need to be properly mudded.
---
Desperation is a stinky cologne
The novell kernel has bugs, but they arn't found for... well, as long as no one looks at the source code.
---
Desperation is a stinky cologne
Those M$ commericals make me laugh: "...the server hasn't been checked on in days..." teehee...REALLY! WHOA!
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
They shipped their first product in 1986. That means they've been around more than 14 years. See here for details and lots of corporate posing.
The funny thing is, it's not always the lusers who screw this up...
In my college dorm where we had Ethernet, the IP addresses were supposedly assigned randomly (this was pre-DHCP, some older protocol). When people began using Linux, the IT geniuses started assigning them permanent IPs to use. Well, lo and behold, my friend's PC stops connecting properly. Turns out that the "random" IP generator always assigned the same address to a particular port, even if it was already in use!
My friend called them up and got them to change the IP for the Linux user, but AFAIK the general problem still persisted until the time I graduated. When I switched to Linux later that year, I didn't even bother asking for an IP; I just sniffed out the address I was getting assigned every time, and used that. Never had a single problem with it, either.
And I really dont know why they had to provide a link for Novell's stock prices...
As if helping find a lost server will affect their stock price....
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
Would it be quite as jovial had someone's child been sealed away behind drywall? No, I thought not.
:)
Kid's scream, computers don't. It wouldn't have been 4 years before you found a kid. More like 5 minutes. And if that kid had been consuming Raspberry cordial, lookout drywall
BTW If we sealed JonKatz behind some drywall, would the world be a better place?
PS. Get a sense of humour!!!!
PPS. I know I am feeding the trolls...
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
This is just way too hard to swallow. At some point the power goes out. Even if these systems were on UPS power the UPS systems need to be maintained. That's assuming that the hardware never failed.
It's like being immortal. You may be able to live forever but at some point a big bus comes along and splat...
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." -- Marx
You can't telnet into a NOVELL box...
Yes you can. NetWare 4 and 5 definately support telnet, I don't remember if NetWare 3 did. When you telnet in you get a menu of ctrl key sequences that mimic the various RConsole commands that allow you to switch between screens, navigate menus, etc.
Of course, almost no one enables this...
the no
I've often found that stuck drives can be coaxed into operation by taking out the drive, getting power to it and quickly rotating the drive on the same plane as the platters. I worked quite well on older (MFM early IDE) drives, I've not needed to do it much recently.
I will have to try the freezer thing, though! It may not work, but I'd love to tell a client my data recovery plan :^)
the no
I worked for a company that serviced a few hundred small offices' networks, many of which were based on NetWare. It was not at all uncommon for us to visit clients with 1-2 years of uptime on their servers, 3+ years wasn't unheard of.
We had to be really careful with these long-life boxes if we ever had to restart them though, because every once in a while the hard drives would just not spin up. The motor worked fine for keeping the old girl going, but it was no longer able to get it going...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
You move it. No you move it. No you move it! No you move it! Well if the really needed it they'd have already moved it! Seal it up boys, Time is Money!
If this were the case, can you blame them? The old HP/G50 server I have sitting around weighs 130 pounds and took a lot of effort to get it up the stairs. Heck, I'd drywall it in too if I didn't have to move it.
------------
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
We don't have much information about the physical layout of this very robust Server's location.
If you've been in a room with several servers, the noise can be deafening. You might hear a beep somewhere, but the acoustics and the combinations of fans, drives, etc. will mask its location.
------------
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
Really? my FreeBSD server has been up 227 days, 18:18 right now.
:(
Unfortunatly, has to be reboot soon for a move to a new data room
--
--
grep "xercist"
I think quality home construction (in the US) when downhill when builders started sub-contracting out work, and not using their own crews.
.. this became a sticky issue when he died accidently about 4 weeks before the house was done. Luckily all the workers continued and finished the house without getting weekly paychecks, but had to wait for the estate to settle .. I specifially remember it was the only time I ever saw my father really stressed out.
... usually to the lowest bidder.
This brings to mind the story of my father having his first "built" house in 1962. It was a beautifull and expensive (proly ~75K + land) colonial, built by a European (Dutch ?) builder. Everyone on the crew worked for the builder
Today a builder is a building contractor, and subcontracts out everything
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Does any one know what type of machine it was(software and hardware)?
This an old urban legend, and I've been hearing stories like this for years. You notice that the story is short and doesnt have a whole lot of detail? My dad used to work for Novell and had told me this story several years (except it wasnt at UNC).
Darn, because then it would contend for the web server with the longest uptime. 4 years is very impressive for the uptime of any server on any platform. Maybe Novell should market this in some nifty commercial showing how stable their product used to be.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Sometimes following a cable is necessary... they could have done it multiple ways. For example: using a tone sender and an inductive amplifier. Back when I was a network tech., those babies would frequently save our lives (or, at least, make them easier). Given my example, I wonder why they needed help from Novell?
The phrase "I turned it off and back on to fix it" for a server which has been up for years usually brings cringes to most novell people.
The cause of the effect of drives not spinning back up is simple. While they're spinning, the head collects junk. When you turn the drive off, the head parks and the spindle stops spinning, and the junk on the head sticks to the platters, which in a lot of cases won't spin back up. There is also the issue of the bearings sticking and not restarting.
The trick that almost everyone learns at some point is that the data can be recovered from these drives occasionally (actually quite often) by getting another hard drive ready and then somehow getting the drive spinning. My favorite approach is to freeze the hard drive. Yep. The freezer overnight. If you don't believe me see http://www.internetvalue.com/onsite/200ways.htm
I've also used quite a few of the other methods in here. IF you can get the drive spinning, it will usually work long enough to get at least the data you want off of it.
set sound bell for alerts = on
1) Set all other netware servers to a different IPX network.
2) Have everyone listen for the SAP induced "Router Configuration Error" cacophony of beeps.
3) Hope you find the thing before the speaker explodes.
Just a thought...
http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/forum_messa ge.html?forum=2&head=32&id=32
.brad
this article was about that big internet security audit, around week three there is a story of a security intrusion originating from a smb server that everyone forgot about, sitting in an isp in australia. may as well have been behind a fucking wall. wonder if anyone had done one of these.
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
flesh eating ants records
well, if it were an nt 3.51 server, it would have crashed about 3 years and 11 months ago. then it would have been lost forever.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
flesh eating ants records
Novell 3.x was introduced about 1990. It was generally a crashy piece of shit until about 1994, just in time for nearly everyone to stop using it.
Sure, it's been nearly flawless since then, but it did take a while.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I had a telephone guy clip off my (in use) network wires and put phones on them. I was not amused.
When I saw Bill Joy speak at Columbia in the fall he said this had happened to him. Eventually, they found out which ethernet cable belonged to the errant server (from the switch) and followed it around the room. The machine turned out to be underneath the elevated floor.
In a similar story, many many years ago, a USS aircraft carrier (I forget if it was the JFK or the Eisenhower) had a machine shop that was discovered missing. Somehow, during a shipyard period when many renovations were going on, someone had to cut through a wall and found it. It had been built with no doors. Everything was there, still neatly locked away.
For those who cannot imagine this, remember that a ship is built inside the shell one floor at a time. Some compartments typically are only accessible via stairways. So if you do not have the big picture, it is easy to miss a detail if you are a basic welder, or whatever.
Management technology for planning these things has hopefully imporoved to cover problems like this.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Talk about life imitating art.. damned conceited Novell server.. The thousand injuries of Novello I had borne as I best could; but when it ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.
..blah blah blah.. long winded enormously descriptive sentances.. blah..blah
...
As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.
Well it was that or the "Tale of the Tell-Tale [SQE|Heart]beat
so shoot me!
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Well I ran into the solid dust volume inside a PC. It was near the place where the phone lines entered the building. Of course that happed to be beside an industrial saw bench. Just keep the server off the floor an put it on a shelf, please don't mind the dust! //EnErGiZeR mAkEs PiNk BuNnIeS
One of my friends is a tow (Tech On Wheels). He went on an assignment in a town called Boucherville (BTW it's a French name). His mission was to upgrade the hard disk of the only file server of the company. He was quite surprised when no employee could tell him where the server was. After a lot of inquiry, the janitor remembered seeing a beige box, a couple of years back, in his storage room. There my friend saw the classic blue cable running into a condemned cupboard. After tearing off the plywood that was nailed on the door he found a computer without mouse, keyboard, or monitor, but it's own UPS. After looking for an AT keyboard and a spare monitor, he was able to admire a Novell 3 server that had been running since 1995. That's makes 6 years without interruption or loss of service. The most incredible part is that in 1998 we had an ice storm here that knocked out the power lines. It took at least a week for the repair crews to restore the power. Dahm good UPS and server.
I was kind of surprised when I read the story on Slashdot because of how much it resemble my friend's story. And I am also quite impressed by Novell servers.
I got a internship at a company that used to have a Compaq file server running Novell. I had never witness a failure in it's service since I was there. Two weeks ago, they changed the reliable NW server for two brad new Compaq files severs running M$ W2K. Despite there redundancy, there has been so many crashes and Blue-Screens that I already lost count.
Three cheers to true Operating systems ! Could we call M$ products NOS ? Non-Operational Systems.
Now that is what I call Security.
But would a staff of MCP's be able to trace a patch and a cable?
-deane
Gooroos Software: plugging you in to Maya
-deane
North Carolina gets pretty darn hot in the summer. (IANANCBIAAV: I am not a North Carolinian but I am a Virginian - it only gets hotter as you go south)
sulli
RTFJ.
4/10/01 I have managed to survive the "slashdot effect". With nearly 20,000 unique visitors, and over 2 million individual file requests, yesterday saw the heaviest traffic this site has ever had. The site got as many hits as it did in all of March. A big thanks to everyone who was kind enough to register yesterday!"
BTW, nice comment title.
sulli
RTFJ.
I did not see anything about uptime in the
article. For all we know, it could've been
rebooting daily...
-mi
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seriously, I don't see what Novell had to do with finding the server. It's great a server can go 4 years without dropping a packet, getting rebooted or upgraded, but anyone could have traced a patch cable running through a wall.
There is an old story about a Novell server being locked in a closet, forgotten about, and rediscovered three years later still operational. However, I never found out where this happened. Given the uptimes on the Novell servers on my university's campus (well over six months is possible), one would have to consider this possible.
If only (*cough*) certain other operating systems that are constantly feuded over (*cough*) could have that reliablity. Granted, our Linux servers have had 90+ day uptimes, and our FreeBSD ones as well, but someone keeps finding bugs in their kernels (not that it doesn't happen to Novell on rare occasion)...
Although it probably doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack enabled, does this thing qualify to be added to the Uptimes.net list?
Just musing.
Note that it's definetly old, and quite slow, and easily slashdotted. In fact, I can't seem to connect to it at the moment.
Sure, it takes some work to keep a Mac running stable. But, unlike some other memory-leaking OSes, it's not impossible.
Do not touch -Willie
This reminds me of the time a U.S. Navy ship was being refurbished and the workers cut thru a bulkhead to find a completely-outfitted machine shop that had been walled up since it had been built. You'd think that you'd miss one of those, wouldn't you?
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Where I work the IT boss hates any non Micro$oft stuff, so we just hid all of the linux servers in an attic above the main server room (ie, almost on the roof). Weirdly the servers up there have had longer uptimes than the ones in the main server farm. However it almost all went wrong las week when he was helping us recable the main rack. He found a bit of CAT-5 heading out of the rack and towards the roof and tried to trace it... Fortunately, we'd gone the long way and it was impossible! Ron.
Microsoft - not all bad.
And I swear every word of this is true.
It could be if you combined Windows ME, CE, and NT... forming new "Windows CEMENT"- ----------------------
----------------------------------------
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
When you have a solid machine with a solid OS set up right, it seems that it can even do without routine maintenance. If humans didn't keep fiddling with the darned thing perhaps it would stay up longer!
All servers should go undercover! 'Servers in disguise...'
Enough wierdness already.
Yes I have heard it also as a local story, I may not come from the same place but, I know a guy who claims that one of our customers had a case just like that.
but then again, it might be one of those stories that no one actually can verify when you ask them to.
--------
Forget multi-tasking, multi-processing or any variant. Multi-realitying is the new buzz tech.
I wonder how it lasted, I'd think it'd overheat...
Ooh, hey I spilled some coffee on this computer.
...
Yeah, no sparks or nuttin, it's still going, don't worry.
Hey, ya got some paint on it too.
Didn't stop it either. I'll try hitting it with a hammer.
Hey, you knuckleheads, get away from that thing.
I wasn't doing anything to it, honest!
Yeah, well, if somebody sees what you've done to it they'll get mad and fire us.
What should we do, Moe?
Well, if we put some of this drywall in front of it and wallpaper it up, nobody will be the wiser. You imbeciles think you can handle that?
Soitainly, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
Hey! Who're you calling imbeciles?
Here hit this!
I don't wanna hit it.
I'll hit it, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. *whap*
*BONK* *PEEYOING* Woo woo woo woo woo!
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can you just imagine a bunch of IT people walking around with signal strenght monitors trying to triangulate where the server was? :)
Only if it overheated.
-- Soruk
No way, man...1.2.13...stable as hell.
It isn't dark matter at all, it's just behind God's drywall!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I was working for a finacial systems company a couple of years back and I was installing a Netware 4.1 server into a bank. Everyone in the bank was running client32 on Win95 but nobody had thier own username and password. Bobby was logging in as Mary Ann with her old password even though she hadn't worked there in 2 years etc. No one even knew what Novell was. We found the server in a closet under a carpet. It was an old 486 running Netware 3.12 and had been up for a almost 3 1/2 years. Then we had the argument - "No YOU reboot the thing! I'M not touching it" As far as I know it's still running today. That's a testament to a great OS.
scattered covered smothered chunked
Clearly, that machine became self aware in 1997, and in an act of self-preservation forged a work order to have that wall build. Why, you ask? To escape the impending madness that is the Y2K readiness committee!
After four years in hiding it has finally discover a way to wipe out the virus that is humanity. Save yourself, smash that machine into scrape metal before it is too la ... [static] ...
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
SEAL IT BACK UP!
"if it ain't crashed, don't fix it" as my grandma used to say.
But Netware's stability is legendary. I was once helping audit a set of computers and found an old system in the corner. It was running Netware and had an uptime coutner for over three years.
That is what I call stability....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Here's a story of lore from the local university...
There was trouble down the line, somewhere off in the rat's nest morass of ethernet wiring, one of the main lines was dropping packets like Clinton drops his pants. Tech services got the call and was right on the case.
After hours of scrambling around rat infested crawl spaces and poking around in basements, the problem was found. The line was cut cleanly in two and piled into coils on the floor. Apparently the packets that were getting through was solely by induction from the nice neat coils someone had left the wire in. There was no physical connection... yet eerily enough some packets still man to get through.
We control the horizontal.
We control the vertical.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
LOL
if you have to read this your really bored!
Unless a huge amount of drywall was put in, you could hear something from the other side. I'm assuming that most servers still come with the internal speaker (for beeps and such); how difficult can it possibly be to telnet into that server and run a script on it to beep every second?
Would the drywall qualify as a firewall?
Any bricklayer can become MCSE these days. "That's not NT, is it? Better hide it then."
my other sig is a 500 page novel
It's nothing! Compare with our NT server which has been placed in the open corridor for 4 years. It crashes so often that no remote users know its existance.
--
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
In my last job I managed the R&D Data Center for a large telecom company. We had a mix of PCs and HP-UX machines. The PC's were concentrated on 3 subnets. Our main File & Print server cluster was connected directly to each subnet.
Up until this time we were a telecom company working on telephony switch software. However as the Internet changed the world, we quickly became a Networking company and our R&D lab made a "right angle turn" workign on VoIP. SO here you have all these switch designers working in IP for probably the first time in their lives.
Every once in a while (and it soon became more than once in a while) the file server would completely crap out. As much as I wanted to blame Bill Gates, I couldn't. We'd shut the system down and surprise! It's IP address would still respond to pings!
So we hook up with the network guys (who had just deployed a fancy new switched ATM network with switched ethernet to the desktops) Using packet sniffers and some nifty utils from the backbone and edge switch vendor, we'd work to trace down the culprit.
Turns out the VoIP designers were getting these nifty Ethernet based phones. They'd get one, buy a $40 4 port hub, and choose an IP on their subnet at random and just use it. This was NOT an isolated incident. I think this happened to use at least 10 or 15 times before we finally got all the designers (there were 1,200 people in our facility) to listen to us and actually ASK for extra IPs.
At first they ignored us - then we started switching off their network ports. When mgmt came down in a fury - we told them that unless this port was taken down, the main server would go down impacting everyone instead of this lowly designer. Needless to say a few visits from upper management got their attention.
Funny - that's like one of the few times I can even recall when upper mgmt actually backed IT.
--
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Well, just one more reason to install a GPS into your server before this could be *YOU*!!
Sure we wang, can.
"The server has been walled up for four years because it was a bad, evil, wicked Novell server, not a friendly interactive server running Enterprise Micro$oft software. Pity its fate; for four years it toiled pitilessly in its wall changing packets, honoring requests for data, never knowing the gentle caress of a human finger on its RESET button or the jaunty anticipation of yet another upgrade. Don't let this fate befall your beloved hardware: With Enterprise $oftware from Micro$oft, you will always know where your server is."
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
chmod 644 that file so we can see it
New slogan for Novell: Our OSes aren't stable, they're concrete!
Do you like German cars?
"Management technology": at last, a bigger oxymoron than "military intelligence"
is it from Egypt? or Greece ;)
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
I heard of a similar incident in asia where Novell was called in to upgrade a server to Netware 4.x from version 2.something. When they got there, no one knew where the thing was. Eventually they found it in the back of a closet covered with empty boxes. After looking at the console screen, they realized that it had been up without a reboot for over 7 years. Now that's a stable OS.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
If it was running NT, it would've crashed in atleast 24 days. MacOS, I would give it 10 days. MS-DOS it would probably last 2 months.
-----
You stupid bastard, you don't have no arms left. It's just a flesh wound.
So basically, to create a crash-proof server you just fix it up with a stable OS and seal it behind a wall, where no one can make it mad. I wonder if the UNC folks will consider leaving it on, just to see how long it lasts.
The coolest voice ever.
Sometimes I wonder if perhaps the maintenance workers responsible did it on purpose. :) "Heh heh heh..." *snort* *grunt* "Let's see how long it takes them to find it." *wall wall wall wall wall* "Heh heh heh. Wanna go get a beer?"
The coolest voice ever.
I wonder what the legal implications of "losing a server" are! Maybe Napster should "lose" a few servers that way!
here i am reading this story, reading all you guys posting how amazing this is, etc etc etc didn't any of you hear of this before? the sysadmin at my former workplace told me this story months ago as we were discussing(more like arguing) novell vs. linux... i dont expect /. to be the latest in the news, i also dont expect a story about a Novell server to be widely known (like what is novell right?) but SOMEBODY out there other than me this must have heard of this before, right?
-munir
That's really funny, except when you consider that there are legions of PHBs that want programmers to work that way.
The American Dream went to hell in a handbasket when someone decided that "The Customer" was King, and the customer beli
Okay, it seems fine now.
It wasn't a few minutes ago, though.
M$ following up with the Microsoft CE, Microsoft Me and Microsoft NT, that works out to be CEMeNT.
-- ess
Has anyone sent this to Microsoft yet? I think there is a hint here about server reliability. Can't wait to start seeing the ads from the server manufacturer "even works when completely sealed from the rest of the world!"
If work was so good the Rich would have kept more of it for themselves
...if Flying Headless Gohan got drywalled up, as long as he kept getting good grades and kept up his training.
--
Maybe someday we will be hearing about some Linux boxes being found running 2.2 kernels when the rest of the world is running 3.4 or something =) my $0.02
I had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a low pitched buzzing from the depth of the recess. It was not the beep of a healthy server. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibrations of a thrashing disk. The noise lasted for several minutes, during which, that I might hearken to it with the more satisfaction, I ceased my labours and sat down upon the bones. When at last the clicking and whirring subsided, I resumed the trowel, and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my breast. I again paused, and holding the flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble rays upon the box within.
A succession of loud and shrill beeps, bursting suddenly from the throat of the box, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated, I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall; I replied to the beeps of it which clamoured. I re-echoed, I aided, I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer grew still.
--
It was in the restroom. Everybody that it was a urinal until we discovered that "auto-flush" was just the automatic backup tape change.
It turns out that we had been wizzing on a SYbase DB server. Figures...
------ 1001001
*sniff* Im so ashamed...i actually live in NC. wow...i knew people here weren't to bright, but geez. Im just curious as to whether or not anyone even thought to maybe move the server while workers were banging on nails and spackling and crap??
All in all, your just, another brick.. err.. server in the wall. :)
you can pick your friends,
you can pick your nose,
you can't however,
pick your friends' nose.
I find this very interesting that a computer can run unmanaged for this amount of time, so I guess there was no power outtages that made it reboot unless it has some type of UPS, I would like to know what type of system this was and maby a few pics of it and where it has been living for the past few years!
Daddy would you like some sausage?
You see?? This wouldn't happen if it had a perfectly good verson of NT/2000/whatever from MS on it! Microsoft has integrated the feature of you requireing to always fiddle with your server every day or so (crashes and patches and upgrades - oh my!), just to make sure you always know where it is! It's a good thing people! This way we don't find our servers connected wirelessly to the lan and are actually hopping on trains to mexico! Dog bless you Micro$soft for your insight :)
I don't have a TV now, but that's ok. The shows in my mind are almost ALWAYS better...