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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*
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.
... 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
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
Schroedinbugs!
-30-
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...
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-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
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...
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.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Perhaps it was in the "Rack of Amontillado"
In pace requiescat...
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
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.
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?
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
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.
Microsoft Windows NT © - not yet compatible with being sealed behind walls.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
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
I want to know just how the hell you can inadvertently put up a wall.
And the brethren went away edified.
punching a hole in the firewall.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
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
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
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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...
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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.
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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
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
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"
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'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
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?
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
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.
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"
And I swear every word of this is true.
It could be if you combined Windows ME, CE, and NT... forming new "Windows CEMENT"- ----------------------
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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] ...
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Codeala - Just another mindless drone
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?
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 $40 4 port hub, and choose an IP on their subnet at random and just use it. This was NOT an isolated incident. I think this happened to use at least 10 or 15 times before we finally got all the designers (there were 1,200 people in our facility) to listen to us and actually ASK for extra IPs.
At first they ignored us - then we started switching off their network ports. When mgmt came down in a fury - we told them that unless this port was taken down, the main server would go down impacting everyone instead of this lowly designer. Needless to say a few visits from upper management got their attention.
Funny - that's like one of the few times I can even recall when upper mgmt actually backed IT.
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Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
"The server has been walled up for four years because it was a bad, evil, wicked Novell server, not a friendly interactive server running Enterprise Micro$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:[.]
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