Slashdot Mirror
When Shipping the Big Iron...?
"When the driver and our receiving personnel opened the trailer door the crate was lying on its side, it was upright when it left the
warehouse. The drive stated that he had hear a loud bang after making a turn and had thought he may have blown a tire.
On the crate there were several shock sensors and tilt sensors only one of which had tripped (the one which was face up when it was on its side). There were also instructions telling us what to do if these sensors had been tripped.
The instructions told us to accept shipment but to inspect for damage and call the carrier if we found any. We did accept shipment but did not open the crate to inspect for damage. We made a note of the situation on the bill of lading with the driver present then contacted our respresentative at Sun for advice.
Our representative is having a replacement shipped to us and the unit which is here now will be picked up and sent back.
I was quite surprised that the crate was not strapped in and tied down tight given how narrow, tall, and heavy this crate was, not to mention the value of its contents.
My question of the Slashdot Community is: What other Big Iron shipping nightmare stories
have you got?"
The only purpose of your post was to advertise you got a sweet server, and i don't. Bastard.
heck, I can't even get ups to deliver a freakin DSL modem without a hassle- I REALLY feel sorry for anyone who tries to ship valuables these days-
best advice:
get yourself a bigass u-haul and a troupe of acrobatic midgets. Have them ride in the back of the truck...
when you hit a corner and it starts to tip, the midgets can climb up on each other and hold it in place. problem solved! (warning: make sure your midgets are strong.)
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
by 8' fall
That should have been your first warning...
Timber!
May I suggest some other future "slow news day" stories:
I sometimes work with a company that overhauls snowmobile engines. They received one engine that had been packed using that foam insulation you can get in spray cans (not wrapped in anything, such as plastic, beforehand). Took them several days to clean the foam off/out of it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
An old friend of mine who worked for an ISP that shall remain nameless was one of the engineers working on the webcast of a Very Large Event (tm). They needed to deploy all of the architecture, etc. needed to broadcast the video to thousands and thousands of people worldwide, and they were under a tight deadline.
So, there were a multitude of servers, network gear, cables, etc. that all were shipped to the location. Most of it made it there okay. But a rather key piece - a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar Cisco 7513 that was to serve as the core router for the whole infrastructure, never made it to its destination. The shipping company sort of shrugged and apologized, but that still left the problem of how to get a new 7513 to the location in time.
Cisco was very helpful - promptly delivering a new 7513 on rush, but it was delivered to the ISPs offices. They opted not to trust it to the vagaries of shipping, and instead put someone on a plane, and checked the crated router as "critical cargo", supposedly the highest level of service an airline will give.
Well, they lost it.
It got put on a cargo plane to somewhere remote, and wouldn't be back for days. The people at the ISP were frantic. They needed a router RIGHT NOW, something they could get over there, and they needed some transport mechanism that would be foolproof.
So, they pulled a standby 7513 out of production, scraped together the needed linecards, put it on a handtruck, and drove it to the airport. Once there, they bought the escorting engineer two plane tickets - one for the engineer.........and one for the router. Of course, a 7513 is too big for coach seats, so they put the both of them right next to each other......in first-class.
History does not record whether the router had the chicken or the fish.
But, the router made it there, probably having enjoyed the in-flight movies and complimentary steamed towels, and cheerfully fulfilled its duty , pushing packets to and fro.
And then it was shipped back UPS ground, probably dreaming of its taste of the high life.
Matt
me@mzi.to
We ship $250k high speed tape recorders. The tapes are rather big, and a little sticker on the insertion slot show a yellow triangle, an hand reaching into the slot, and a line through it. Meaning: don't stick your hand in the slot. Well, that wasn't specific enough, I guess, or maybe there should be an additional sticker on the shipping crate: someone drove a forklift precisely into the slot.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
When receiving the first of two shipments of our SGI Origin 2400 (64-way machine in 4 racks) one of the crates began to tip on its way down the hydraulic lift on the back of the truck. My boss nearly took one for the team. As he saw it beginning to tip he let loose a flurry of obscenities not often associated with respected professors of Biochemistry, and proceeded to lunge forward and throw his weight against the half-ton SGI crate, successfully averting the disaster. The next thing out of his mouth was "What just happened?". Some sort of genetic geek reflex I guess. =)
Brandon D. Valentine
at least not the type of streaming this guy is talking about.
werd to yo motha, muh nizzle.
SGI of course, diden't make a big deal about the sales. It doesen't look good on the glossy literature that your servers are being used to stream porn.... Most of the stuff still worked, even the MB traces were protected with a think gooey film.
thick gooey film ? Yo that wasn't protection that was the lack of protection! Hope you washed your hands.
...because Seth Warshavsky never handed anybody a real check. :-)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I work for a place in Georgia which has part of the company in California. The California branch sent us half a dozen huge rackmount servers... packed in T-shirts. Apparently the company out there had bought 3,000 t-shirts during the dotcom boom, and had nothing to do with them now. So they were using them as packing material. Consequently 2 of the 6 machines had giant dents in them from being dropped and wouldn't function.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Years ago, I worked for a large telecommunications company (who'll remain nameless, we'll call it 'T'). The particular location I was in, housed an R&D branch, and a large plant located in the back of the building. We had ordered a piece of equipment that 'T' manufactured. In fact, they made it in the plant in the back. They had finished building our equipment (a switch) in the plant, and were ready to deliver it to us. Rather than doing the sensible thing (i.e. rolled through the hall to us), they were required (by the plant's union) to deliver it by truck. This meant that it would be put aboard a truck on one end of the plant, driven around the building to the receiving dock, where they would take it off the truck, and then roll it through the halls to us. To make a long story short, in the process of shipping the switch, they lost it! We ended up with another switch (same shipping procedure) a few weeks later.
[Insert pithy quote here]
of a fully loaded Clarion that some company had loaded onto the back of a truck to move from one building to another. Basically, it was a move across the parking lot. FYI, a Clarion is a fully racked system about 8 feet tall used for network attached storage.
Two guys with the truck got the Clarion onto the the truck, but DIDN'T LOCK THE WHEELS. The truck was on a slight incline. Out rolled the Clarion, over the edge of the lift, tipped top first. The pictures show the Clarion trapped, between the lift and the asphault of the parking lot at about a 30 degree angle.
I bet A) Someone lost their job for this. B) Some sales manager at EMC was delighted. C) That some insurance company is very unhappy.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
(warning: make sure your midgets are strong.)
Jeez, would you guys cool it already? My fortune file is big enough as it is!
The nightmare is waking up and realizing that you wasted a million dollars on a SunFire 4800.
Someone you trust is one of us.
In the 80's I got a tape drive from a two-letter company. Shipped with the tape drive was ... a q-tip. Not just any q-tip, a single q-tip in it's own sealed bag with not one but two part numbers (the internal part number, and the external customer part number). Often I wanted to call and give the part number just to see what it would cost to reorder.
Given the choice between units created by the French, and units created by anyone else, you'd have to choose...
Anyone else.
I applied for a job at Sun in San Diego in 1999. It's a little bastion of Sun just north of UTC. I happen to be applying at their high performance computing facility. This is where they design the big iron. As described to me by my host, "... from the boards to the badge on the front."
He walked me through the desgin floor. It was a standard raised floor datacenter with boxes, pdus and the like. There were a couple of old guys working on boards and stuff. They were working on the next generation big box. He claimed it was the E12K, but it is now known as the E15K. Anyhow...
I spotted an E10K in the middle of the room, it looked a little naked -- missing all of it's skins -- next to another E10K. The frame looked a little beat up too. I asked him about it. He said that just because they design the stuff doesn't mean that they can have as many as they want and they had to order a n E10K that they wanted from Sun. It was shipped on a truck from the Bay Area to their office. Somehow it managed to fall eight feet off the back. The skins shattered and the frame bent.
They took delivery, but filed a claim.
Sun shipped them a new E10K and it made it off the truck ok. The first E10K was taken apart and reassbled after the engineers who designed the damn thing repaired it by bending the metal frame back. As far as I know, not a single card was broken and it worked like a champ.
My guide described the machines as being "fully loaded". This could mean a number of things, but I took it as having every slot filled mostly with cpu/mem and a few io. The truck driver pushed a four million dollar machine off the back of his rig! I believe the quote for the chassis was $300K. That is the case. My super l33t rackmount antec case cost me $219.
The kicker is these guys ordered one E10K and got two. Who cares if the frame is a little bent.
Came into work early one Monday morning, and on my way through the IT area noticed the new blade server had fallen over and crashed. Literally.
The six-foot cabinet was lying at an angle of about 45 degrees, propped up by three or four blade drawers that were fully extended on their guiderails.
This multikilobuck piece of super-hi-tech kit did not have the sort of anti-tipping mechanism el-cheapo filing cabinets have had for a century or more -- some method of preventing a user from extending more than one blade at a time. Somehow, somebody (maybe one of the cleaning staff -- we never did find out who) had pulled enough blade drawers out that the entire case had overbalanced and tipped forward.
Later the guys installing it found the manufacturer's solution to this problem in the packaging -- a large pressed-steel duckfoot meant to be bolted onto the front of the case. Hi-tech my fundament.
You think you're joking, but I was one of those midgets when Dad decided he was going to buy a 'fridge and my two brothers and I were in the cargo area of the U-haul doing exactly that -- climbing around the fridge, keeping it in place.
Let me get this straight - you waited around on Christmas day for a server?
I've received several interesting parts from Sun over the years.....
:)
:)
Way back when I had ordered a replacement 2.1g SCSI HD to replace one in my SPARC 10 that had failed.
Anyway, one day a BIG box showed up (big compared to the size of a 2.1g disk, anyway). ever see the boxes they used to ship VMEbus boards in?
Anywho, inside that box was.... get this.... a 0.5amp slow-blow fuse!
An eentsy-weentsy fuse in that HUGE VMEbus box!
My personal favorite though is Sun part # 414-1100-01. Every time we get a new sales rep on our account, we make them try to quote us a dozen of them for purchase.
The 414-1100-01 is a 2x4. You know, a block of wood. It's part of the shipping crate that Exx00 equipment shows up in. Each and every piece of wood and foam in that thing has a part number.
Our poor sales reps.... the part # isn't listed on _any_ sales sheets... they go _crazy_ trying to figure it out!
But Big Iron no less. I used to work in a distribution center for a fairly large baby product manufacturer. They had a counterbalance or HiLo that the brakes had gone out on. So we called the leasing compnay to come out and get it.
The repair guy showed up with a low boy (flatbed truck) at a receiving bay and proceeded to FLY across the dock at top speed. Everyone yelled at him to slow down, that the brakes were out, but he was 'too experienced'. He knew what he was doing. He'd done this a million times.
Off the dock, onto the lowboy, through the fence on the lowboy, through the air, through the side of a 53' trailer, and there it stuck.
These things weigh ~ 12000 lbs, he jumped it like the General Lee into a tractor trailer, pretty awesome.
We had security video of a receiving guy driving one of these off the dock as well, that video got a LOT of airtime. At least more than the HiLo did.
Working in a warehouse you build up a long list of these stories. The guy who tipped over a HiLo is often a favorite, 13klbs hitting the floor of a warehouse, breaking it, breaking the floor, shaking the building, and walking away.
Adminning might be (slightly) safer, but nowhere near as much fun as driving heavy equipment with little regard for human life.
I like music
Shouldn't you have been waiting for a sleigh?
On the other hand, imagine some very young geek in that other Oak Hill when the truck showed. "Hey, Santa did get my letter!"
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
C-130 Parachute delivery: $20,000
Poverty wage employees (soldiers): $8,000/year.
Watching the RAU turn into a dirtdart without it's parachute deploying: Priceless!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
How about one from a small startup Telco I worked for. They were installing a small switch, 100 miles from an existing office. They took delivery at the established office and did preliminary setup. The cabinet was fairly small and mounted on casters but certainly too large for a personal vehicle.
In renting a truck they had a choice between a covered bed or an open bed one with a lift gate. The weather was to be good so they wrapped it in plastic and only sent one tech.
He smoked. Switch caught fire. He didn't know until the highway patrol pulled him over.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
We ordered (now, before you laugh, this was nigh twenty years ago) an MAI/Basic Four machine for one of our clients (we were a dealer). And we waited. And we waited. To make a long story short, the client was in a hurry, and paid for air freight. Turned out somebody along the line pocketed the money, contracted the shipment out to a trucking company and basically paid for "whenever you have a truck going that general direction that isn't fully loaded" shipping. After much back-and-forth with the mfr, we eventually found the "missing" machine in the shipper's warehouse, where it had sat for weeks.
Eventually(!) we persuaded them to ship it counter-to-counter, and one of the senior partners went to go pick it up personally, with one of the Asoks along for muscle.
They had the joy of watching the beast, in its packing crate, being unloaded from the plane's belly. Saw the loader put it on the conveyor. Saw the loader at the bottom get distracted. Nearly got busted by security for frantically pounding on the observation-area window, screaming and gesticulating. Which was silly, the loader was standing under a jet engine wearing ear protection. But they felt like they had to do something as they watched tens of thousands of dollars of behind-schedule equipment faw down go boom off the end of the conveyor.
Of course, the really funny part was that the client was a regional trucking company itself, and probably could have gotten the the thing trucked in himself via interline agreements. No, I take that back. The really funny part was the scorpion story, but that happened later.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Geez, I don't know what so many people are complaining about. It's nice to see something that breaks up the usual Slashdot monotony. You know, the typical daily:
1. YAMB - Yet Another Microsoft Bug (tm)
2. Why Micro$oft is bad, and how Bill Gates ruined Christmas
3. Cletus runs Linux in his double-wide, the 50 page expose'
4. Judge Dredd hears yet more testimony in the M$ trial, after 4 years, we still care
5. KDE integrates Konquerer into the O/S, 1000's cheer.
6. Microsoft adds a font to Winblows 3000, Adobe sues for monopoly "tying" feature to OS
7. Netscape (who?) releases MooZilla 3.0 RC6 beta 7.0a, 0.0000005% of websurfers everywhere rush to download.
8. Larry Elison comes up with another dumb idea, this one will work! (NetPC, Unbreakable Orikle)
9. Apple releases new Mac that only schools can buy, and why you should give a rat's ass.
10. New replacement penis runs Linux, with BlueTooth it will talk to your watch. Never be late for an erection again!
I wish Slashdot editors would post more porn. My fingers are getting numb scrolling over crap like the above on the front page.
They call it PMS because MadCow Disease was already taken.
A dot-bomb I was contracting for had ordered three racks, stuffed with the requisite servers, switches and so forth (mostly Compaq and Cisco stuff). The boss was great at programming, but not so bright when it came to physical items.
The populated racks arrived in town, at the vendor's local warehouse. They called and asked how it should be delivered. The boss insisted on talking to them, rather than letting the shipping/receiving guy deal with the new toys. Consequently the vendor was told, by the boss, that we had a loading dock at our building. We did not.
"But I thought a loading zone was the same as a loading dock." he later declared. Sorry Dean, they are different.
So the truck & racks arrived. Naturally, they'd sent a truck without a hydraulic/electric tailgate, and only one guy. Each rack was about 1100 lbs. The boss wanted to try unloading them then and there, but even he soon realized that that was not feasible. So they went back.
Several days passed, but the vendor had no suitable truck. After a lot of tantrums from the boss, they finally rented a truck with the necessary tailgate. It arrived at our building, and unloaded the racks and their pallets. Incidentally, everything was properly secured inside the truck both times.
Unfortunately, the boss (who had personally ordered the equipment, which was totally wrong for our needs, but that's another story) never checked dimensions. The racks were 1/2" taller than the elevator doors.
Impatient boss didn't want to remove the servers, etc., disassemble the racks and take the pieces upstairs. Rather, he insisted on getting everyone from the office, removing the pallets (after which the racks were still that 1/2" too tall) and trying to ram them through the doors. Dean sometimes had a hard time with concepts like "metal" and "concrete". Several bad dents and chips later, he gave up.
Next, Dean thought of the brilliant idea of tilting 1100 lb racks. On a tile floor. Even with everyone helping, once tilted, it started sliding uncontrollably and fell over with a massive boom.
Did this discourage him? Nope. He (with help) shoved the first one into the elevator, and somehow got it angled in there. When the doors closed, they scraped along the bottom corner of the rack, and the stainless steel took a nasty gouging.
Unfortunately, the elevator was rated for 800 lbs, not 1100lbs, certainly not 1100lbs with Dean and three helpers = almost 2000 lbs. Nothing dramatic, but the elevator safeties cut in and the elevator wouldn't budge.
Deans's solution? Use a screwdriver and force the fireman's override switch on, of course. I decided it was prudent to take lunch just then. When I got back, they'd gotten:
When they finally made it into the server room, we discovered that, as one might suspect, a number of the units did not function, and had to be replaced. Sure enough, the boss tried to get it replaced on warranty, but I left not long after, so I don't know how things played out...
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
This one's slightly OT but what the heck, the switch was on VERY big iron....
:-)
:-)))
A collegue of mine (who is a top notch programmer) did his service in the Bundeswehr (german military) in the early eighties. His afinity with computers lead him to request asignment as Fernmelder (the people who operate the radio). Turns out it was the dullest job he could have ever chosen. He got asigned to the bridgehead for all military communications in northern german. A tight room suffed with the latest military communication/cryptography equip one could imagine - and they weren't alowed to have a chair to sit on in there whilst reading the telex from one machine and typing it into the other for hours on end and doing nothing else than manually routing the stuff.
Anyhow, the space under the desks was crammed with rows of big, featureless boxes - some hypersecret obviously f*cking expensive electronic cryptodevices manufactured by Nixdorf/Elekluft. Featureless but for two things: Some ominous comcords would go in and out of the back and the front featured THE SWITCH. And I mean a big fat hairy dark red german Bundeswehr SWITCH - covered with a steel latch screwed tight with a M8 Bolt (that's metric threading in case you've wondered).
The Fernmelder where advised to be carefull whilst polishing the floor with that heavy polishing machine, as to NOT come against that SWITCH. Nope, they he was not told what it was for - even though he had the highest clearance for the job.
Anyhow - his boredom and frustration culminated all the way to his last month on duty. He,the living router, was all by him self once again. He took out his pocket knife, losened the bolt, flicked THE SWITCH forth and back and screwed the bolt tight again.
He kept a strait face whilst insisting that he'd just done his job when the commlinks went haywire. Communications where down for a week north of Muenster (kinda a third of west germany), the whole crew got that week off for homestay ("..but stay available..") and my collegue NEVER got pulled in for reserve until today.
The entire Bundeswehr communication was migrated to elektronic routing that very season.
We both have concluded that it probably must have been some security mechanisim to fry the cryptodevices beyond recognition just in case the commies march in...
Moral to the story: Do tell the geek what the switch is for - or he'll try it out.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
My Systems Analysis teacher always told us a story about the time he worked in a large office building. They had ordered a new IBM mainframe (back in the 70's) and had it delivered to the 11th floor. However, its actual destination was the 7th floor. The delivery people, after learning of their mistake, opened the door to the freight elevator and pushed the crate back in, assuming the elevator was still at their floor. It wasn't.
The elevator was on its way back down to the lobby, and they figure the mainframe crashed through at around the 5th floor mark.
My teacher always told this story to explain that we should always double check everything, and never assume anything.
I've always had respect for the Canadians, for doing a complete job. No half-way job for them...
We had a mail server shipped to an office location in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This was a fair sized HP server, fully configured. All that needed to be done was taken to the server room, unpacked, plugged in and turned on. Should be finished Friday evening, with plenty of time to relax over the weekend.
The server was miss-handled at the loading dock, and fell from the truck to the ground. A good four foot drop, but there was still a chance that the system might be functional.
Then the crate was backed into by the shipping truck as it was maneuvering to get out... Still, there may have been undamaged equipment in the box...
But when a fork-lift tine was pushed through the crate, we knew. A complete job was done, with no more questions needed to be asked. Time to ship a new server. <grin>
RonSpace
Why go to the trouble and expense of using acrobatic midgets? Throw a pizza in the back and whistle at some fat girls. Problem solved.