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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?"
When the crate arrived, the driver was so adamant to have the bill of lading signed that we decided to take our time to inspect the crate. We didn't have to inspect for a long time to find a very obvious "little" defect: they simply drove a fork-lift prong through the logic boards...
Needless to say, the driver wasn't very happy not to have our autographs... It was such a masterful job that we oughta asked him for his!!!
Well, most of us in IT were in a staff meeting so the secretary and a couple of the custodial staff packaged up the system for us because it had to ship that night. They managed to pack it into a hastily-built crate, but they forgot to put any damn packing material in the thing. Interestingly, the clones referred to in the title are actually stormtroopers. So naturally the Chicago office opens the crate only to find that the entire machine has been reduced to a fine metallic dust. Fortunately, we had the entire thing backed up, but it just goes to show you: if you want it done right, do it yourself!
They were at least nice enough to give me a Sun 4/490 (1991 take on 5 foot tall 5kw Sun) for free, so i drove home with a truckload of big Sun rack and fussy little sun parts anyway.
I finally did get a sparc center, and only had to drive 400 miles to pick it up. She's named lucy, and she's chewing bytes for a good cause as I write.
The Seattle SGI (now mostly defunct) office workers would toss in $800,000 Origin servers into their little-beat-up-imports. Pitty the foo' that rear-ended them. The porn king Seth Warchoski(sp) would get SGI deliveries this way - he'd often hand them a rubber check in return. When AP called Seth to bitch about the check, he'd say "Oh sorry, I was trying to screw a diferent vendor, come back for a real check"
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.
I managed to cobble a pretty good Indy system out of crap left in their junk closet when I was told to help myself. MB were tossed in with power supplies and sead SCSI drives. Most of the stuff still worked, even the MB traces were protected with a think gooey film.
In short, the make good stuff, so in hindsight, delivery by Honda wasen't such a dumb idea.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I worked summer at a company, programming a PDP11. In addition to the PDP, there were a number of VAXen used for various tasks. We had ordered a new machine from Digital - a complete stýstem with disks, documentation and all. It came on two fully loaded pallets; unfortunately, the shippers came to the site fairly late on friday, and someone (still unclear) told them to just dump the pallets outside the building they were going to. Also, nobody saw fit to call anybody about the arrived shipment.
Come monday morning, it had rained hard the entire shipment was soaked. The plastic wrapping around the boxes weren't tight enough to keep the water out - the manuals were so soggy they could have been wrung through. In the end we didn't accept the shipment, and returned the pallets, and got a replacement from Digital.
Contrast this when, once, we ordered a serial cable. The cable came in a three-foot by three foot shrinkwrapped and taped box, filled almost completely filled with that shock absorbing stuff - and a coiled cable (in its own sealed bag), rattling aroung in a corner of the box.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
We had a similar shipment a while back, though not quite as bad. It was also a full rack cabinet, filled with HP servers. Note, this was through a third party, not HP direct. More on HP later.
It was supposed to be shipped from California to Texas by a specialized carrier. This guys have trucks with some serious shock absorbtion, and the insurance to deal with quarter-million dollar equipment. It was full-service, too. Our computer room was up the loading dock, through a couple departments and low doorways, and up a ramp (raised flooring) through another low doorway. They were supposed to use the mechanized tilting/lifting pallet jacks, get the crate all the way into our computer room, get the rack off the pallet, and roll it into place.
The day before it was scheduled to arrive (at least one good thing), we have a large delivery van (normal crappy suspension) show up at our docks with something addressed to us. We get out there, look at the bill of lading, and sure enough, it's our rack of equipment.
It was just one guy--the driver.
And he doesn't do full service. He only had permission on the bill of lading to drop the package on the docks, and that was it. No mention of full service, and this company didnt' do it anyway.
It turned out it was shipped by air freight instead of truck, then dropped off (via normal van) to a local shipping company, with instructions for them to drop it off to us.
What a load of shit.
We finally ended up with a couple HP reps (only called out to certify our cluster; not move hardware) coming out to help us out. We lucked out that the rack was *just barely* able to fit under our doorways. So, these two HP reps grabbed a bunch of plywood and crap, stripped the crate, got the rack off the crate by quickly rolling it down the plywood (a hair-raising experience), and rolled it to the computer room.
Fortunately, we had a portable ramp built to go up the steps. It took 8 of us to get the rack up the ramp though, but we finally got it into place.
I still have no idea what became of the billing issues with the shipment; no idea if were charged for the full-service shipping, or what.
I used to work in the Final Test and Configuration department for a major Telco supplier. I've seen it all.
I spent the day testing and preparing a bay, finish it and have it wheeled to shipping to find out fifteen minutes later that it was dropped off a fork lift or fell over in the truck en route to our distribution site 2km away.
Then there is also the day that I was distracted by a cute redhead female engineer and I managed to wire up a DC shelf backwards. Three seperate redundant supplies and I didn't notice what I had done until I plugged in the DC cables and smoked $10,000 of power supplies, thankfully the power supplies did their job and no reverse polarity power was supplied to the backplane and half million worth of cards.
Several weeks later he emailed me and wanted to know where his package was. (Delivery only should have taken 2 or 3 days). I looked up the tracking number and found that it had gone from Los Angeles, to Phoenix, from Phoenix, to Los Angeles, from Los Angeles, to Phoenix... etc. for a total of 4 round trips!
FedEx had no clue what the problem was, but eventually it ended up at its destination 21 days after I shipped it.
One of my favorites was a pair of A5000 disk arrays that were delivered in pristine boxes, but when you opened the boxes, the brackets they were bolted into were bent 4 inches over, at a 90 degree angle. Think straight (but misaligned), bent 90 degrees right for 4 inches, bent 90 degrees left and there following the edge of the array.
It was obvious these arrays had been 1) mishandled and 2) repackaged. This wasn't something you could do by accidentally dropping the arrays either; both edges of the bracket had the same bend. It was like they had hit it really hard with a forklift or something, wrapping the bracket across the front of the array, and then said "oh no" and boxed them back up again.
We told the customer to work with our shipping dept and the shipper to resolve the responsibility, and I never heard about it again, so I presume they got satisfaction from someone.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
My mother used to work near Teheran (not the one in Illinois) for a major computer company in the early '70s. In that part of the world it's pretty dusty, so you'd see folks cleaning up with a garen hose. Seems the company had lost a Univac mainframe (read $$,$$$,$$$) shipped from the States, then discovered it had arrived a week or so ago, stored out of the way on the loading dock and faithfully 'cleaned' every day....
After sophomore year when we were all scattering to different EE internships, a friend of mine wound up at IBM Rochester. As the story goes, they were celebrating the 1st shipment of one of their servers (AS/400 maybe?) and were all standing around the panel truck as it was loaded in and drove off. As it took the highway exit and ramped up its speed, the back doors flew open and the box fell out and skidded to a halt on hwy 52. It wasn't latched down, and the back doors weren't latched. So much for the party.
Of course there was no documentation, weird non-standard obsolete hardware, and precious little filespace left (everything that wasn't absolutely crucial to closing the books was deleted to make room.)
Then the damn thing dies for lack of disk space. After Christmas. Before New Years. And there I am stuck with the Accounting folks positively freaking (SEC requirements or something.) Luckly I do recall having seen some old scrap parts for what was apparently from another site's old install of this POS stuffed away in the back of a storage room at HQ.
So I get our hapless Admin Asst. to go in the storage room with a Polaroid and take a few pictures, have her fax those to me, and then extricate what I want her to send me. So she does - ships it overnight top priority. And it doesn't arrive. We do it again. Again goes who knows where. Everything is filled out right, shipper's just have no clue where it is.
OK, last chance. Nobody is in the office but I get through to Security who gets through to the AA who is home while the hubby and kids are off at the movies. Explain our plight, give her directions, and make many promises.
An hour later she's left a note on the kitchen table and is on her way to the airport with the last of the damn hardware packed in her bag, wrapped in a trash bag and padded with a few old blankets. That afternoon they flew cross-country 1st class and had a limo meet them and bring them to my site.
Her husband and kids came home, find the note, follow the directions and were treated to 3 days of resturaunts and a suite at a nearby hotel with unlimited room service. The AA stayed at a luxery spa out where she was on their best plan and got every wrap, scrub & rub on the menu. Plus lots of good champagne on tab for New Years.
I billed it all to hardware support and told the Accounting folks if they didn't like it I'd unplug the damn thing & go home myself. Never heard a peep except after it was all done my boss's boss wanted the weird drive for her desk as a reminder why systems should be standard and retired in a timely manner.
Codicil: Later they hired me for some more work and never blinked an eye when I told them my rates doubled for them, it was worth it to be sure the stuff got DONE.
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.
A company I used to work for dealt with financial equipment. Heavy iron like Unisys A's, V's, the infamous NIE sorters, and the star of our story : the S4000 proof machine.
This particular S4 had a big 10 pocket (IIRC) module and a microfilmer on it. That makes it around 12+ feet long, waist high, and about 3 feet deep. These things are true big iron, as they have a heavy steel frame, huge power supplies, etc. I think they weigh in at around a ton or so. Enough weight that the warehouse schmucks can't just toss em around like sparc stations (ahhh another story for another time ...) Anyway, these things are crated up for shipping by truck. They usually ship really well. Again I suspect this is do the size/weight garnering some respect.
So, this machine shows up at our door with a little hole in the end of the crate. About a 6 in long crack. The shipping/receiving guy notes it on the BOL, and signs for it. Later that day we find out that the hole was from a fork lift fork. The operator has shoved the fork all the way through the machine END WISE! Through around 6 heavy gauge steel panels, structular tubing, big cap banks, all the assorted mechanics in the unit, etc. Hard to imagine this being an accident, ya know?
Machine was scrapped out. I think it took around 8 months to get any money out of the shipper.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
In a prior life, I helped setup the web farm and database server for a dot com that is still around. At that point they were just starting out. We had quickly outstripped the processing capability of a sun ulta 10, and had gotten an E6000.
Couple minor problems. We had already burned up one ultra because we didn't have a dedicated AC, and the building didn't provide AC at night or over the weekend. At the time, we were using $15 fans strapped in the doorways to the "server room" to keep it below 100F.
During the big argument with the CFO's girlfriend (the office manager) about why we needed to have AC put in before we turned on the big box (it needs a 440 power hookup) one of the junior sys admins had unpacked all of the Kingston memory, and left it laying out on a table near where the painters were finishing up.
Oddly enough, we found the boxes for the memory in the phone closet, but the memory was never seen again.
By the time the AC was ready, we had run out the "trial" period from Sun, and when they wanted to get paid, we ended up sending the box back telling them that it didn't mean our current needs.
Anyone care to guess what 4 gig of RAM cost back in 1997?
We frequently have our customers send us their servers for us to install our software on. Not big iron, but we do get some big servers. Anyway, one of our customers from California (we're in Virginia), shipped us a really beautiful Dell rackmount server with all the redundant everythings in it. Anyway, we promptly installed our software and shipped it back UPS.
When the server arrived, the box was waterlogged and when they pulled the server out, water actually poured out of the case. Apparently UPS had left it out in the rain at some point.
Fortunately, it was insured, so our client got a replacement from Dell quickly.
The funny thing is that after a few days of leaving the machine out to dry, they actually tried to plug it in. Booted up just fine. I wouldn't bet on its long term reliability, but I thought that was cool.
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.
I guess this is a little off-topic, but the topic is lame anyway so who cares?
My all-time favorite warning label can be seen on the inside of Ampex DST 812 tape libraries. (Maybe others in that series, too, but mine was a DST 812.)
These things are pretty big-- about eight feet across and four feet deep, with a pair of large doors on the back for access to the tape robotics.
This is a little tough to describe, but try to picture it. The tape drives are in a stack on the left side of the library (viewed from the front). The middle of the library is tape storage, and the right is power supplies and robotics and stuff. There is a big beam that runs down the center of the library, and the robot arm moves left and right along that beam. The arm itself is a big piece of steel with the manipulator and optics mounted on it.
This library has some serious motors in it. When the robot arm needs to go from the left extreme to the right extreme-- a distance of about six feet, I guess-- it makes the trip in about a tenth of a second. Whoom! So fast the whole 2,500 pound chassis shakes a little from absorbing the momentum of the arm when it stops.
Obviously, you're only supposed to have the access doors open when the power is off. There are lots of circuit switches built into the doors to ensure that the power gets cut if the doors are opened. Nevertheless, there's a warning label.
The label, bright yellow, depicts one of those stick-figure people all labels have. He's leaning forward with his head in the back of the machine. The robot arm is coming at him, and the red lightning bolts coming from the place where the arm meets his black-dot head indicate impact, agony, and grievous injury.
All in all, it's pretty darned explicit for a warning label.
I work for a company that sells coin-operated arcade games. You know : the large 400lb (or bigger) monsters we all endlessly feed quarters into.
on a rather frequent basis, we accept shipments that are visibly damaged, on the same contingency you noted : received with damage, contact the shipper for instructions. On a few cases, we have had these LARGE, extremely well built, games destroyed by improper shipping.
It's quite amazing when you see something constructed from 3/4" or 1" plywood utterly smashed flat.
On the other hand, I have a couple of very nice PIII linux servers humming away here. They used to be CPUs running "Hydrothunder" boat race games.
:-)
- JD
My first internship was with a company called Watermark, where I helped out in QA. One of the more enjoyable tasks was tweaking a batch file that commanded the optical jukeboxes we tested...the script was nicknamed "Robocop" by its original creator, and its job was to, from a starting and ending slot #, take each cartridge, stick it in a drive, format it, pull it out, flip it over(this is MO, remember!) and format the OTHER side...then put it back and get the next one. The only thing cooler was the Sony WORM drive that took pizza-sized platters and had a giant "DO NOT REMOVE PANELS WITH UNIT ON, DANGER OF DECAPITATION" sticker with a picture of one of those poor warning-sign-stick figures getting his head chopped off(I swear, those stick figures dudes need to unionize :-) Oh, there was also the RISC based system which we only used for playing CDs(the running joke was "don't leave it in there too long, it'll reduce the CD...")
We did this batch script because, as part of QA, we needed to test fresh installs of the server, and that really needed to be done with completely "clean" MO cartridges loaded...and since it took FOREVER(30 min or so?) to format EACH SIDE, it was much more effective to, right before quittin' time, run around the lab and pick up ALL the cartridges that needed "cleaning", load them all into the biggest library, start robocop and come back the next morning...no, we never accidentally erased something, we were pretty careful.)
So I'm working on our largest library...a DISC library that held 500 slots and 4 drives PER SIDE. It was so large that the sides had to be removed at the factory before they shipped it, because it wouldn't have fit through the door.
Anyway, it had a HUGE beam with a "head" the size of a basketball; beam moves up+down, head moves back and forth and spins internally to rotate cartridges...and this thing is naturally kinda dangerous, so there are intrusion switches for all the doors so you don't stick your head in and get it whacked. A complete 486 PC in the base of the cabinet handled all the robotics and stuff like which slots actually had cartridges(to save time it "knew" whether a slot was loaded assuming you didn't fuck around with it by loading cartridges willy-nilly yourself, and would spit up a "slot full" error immediately if you tried.)
Well, the doors are ALL off and all the switches were jammed with plastic utensils, pencils, etc so the thing would work...so we put a little "danger" sign on the "head", the front of the cabinet, etc.
One day, while I'm running Robocop(we couldn't wait or something, I forget exactly why), and the president walks in with a bunch of investors. "Yes, this is our QA room where we test our releases and certify optical jukeboxes, scanners, and servers with our product. Ah, what are you doing?"
I'm the lowly intern, but nobody else is around..uh..okay...
"Oh, nothing really exciting...here we're using the library here to erase all our cartridges for a new test cycle...[turning towards guy standing within inches of the unit] uh, so...you might want to stand right next to it." This rich asshole investor type gives me this "shut the fuck up, kid" look, doesn't budge a damn inch, and the president coughs. Okay, fine, whatever...
"...and here we're using this bank of systems to load test the server, each machine runs a custom program to pound the ser..."
rich asshole: "HOLY SHIT!"
Mid-word, the drive finished, near-silently ejected the cartridge, and then the robotic arm grabbed the cartridge and made a fast break for the cartridge's assigned slot, scaring the crap out of the guy standing within inches of the head/arm.
I was horrified at the time, but when I told the head of QA and my direct supervisor, they both thought it was hysterical...
Ha. I can one-up you on that one.
One time, we had to return some monitors to a supplier because they were supposed to be new but clearly they were refurbs - peeling the labels off of the box we found records of the monitors being in the repair shop.
So somehow we managed to pack two 19" Sony Multiscan G400's in the original packaging into the back seat of a Toyota Camry. These were so big that you could not put one in the front seat or the trunk. What happenned when we got to the warehouse is another storey entirely. But I can tell you that the back door of a Camry will take boxes that are 49" by 49" the side and not a hair bigger.
I work for a company that is a sponser for the Olympics. While delivering all of our printers & copiers, we never had one damaged.
Why? Because they strapped in everything. Heck, when we were done delivering, they would strap in anything left over so it wouldn't just fly around the truck.
Some drivers were better than other, but overall, we had no shipping issues.
My best advice is to use an electronic logistics company to move your equipment. They may cost more, but when you receive damaged equipment, the lost time will more than likely pay for the difference.
Bruce Kennard was called, as one of the last remaining dealers in legacy DEC systems in the bay area, and given an opportunity to save the machines from the smelter who wanted them. The catch was: All the PDP10s and a boatload of SA10s (PDP10 IOBus to IBM Channel Adapaters) and an even LARGER boatload of Memorex Washing-machine disks had to go too (If I recall correctly, there were 145 of these, some of which were side-by-side double-spindle units). And we had 48 hours to do it. Bruce could beat the smetlers price, but couldn't assemble a crew to move the equipment before the deadline. I had a crew, but couldn't raise the money. A deal was struck: I'd move all the equipment out of BT's space down to Bruce's warehouse a couple of miles away, in exchange Eric Smith & I would get to keep one of the complete KL10s.
On the day of the move, I show up with a 17-foot box van, and four guys, and we begin filling the truck with 200ish pound each disk drives, fifteen at a time. At BT, we were loading from a dock-height ramp, but at Bruce's warehouse, we had to unload with a forklift, so each round trip took close to 45 minutes.
Now these disks were being knocked apart for breakage - nobody wanted Channel-attached 300ish megabyte washing machines any more, so we weren't being particularly careful with them, i.e. no tie-downs or anything in the truck.
We had made seven or eight trips, and things were moving pretty smoothly.I was passenging, and a friend was driving. Then, a car passes us blowing his horn and flashing his lights. I get this horrible sick sensation -- I immediately know what has happend. We pull over, and where there HAD been fifteen disks, were now 6. So, we double back, and in an otherwise busy intersection were 9 of these beasts in various levels of decomposition. I thank deity that none of them fell onto another motorist. With just the two of us, and a team of Fremont City Cops heckling (but not helping) we get the drives wrestled back into the truck, and down to Bruce's warehouse.
The LAST load of the night is taking the PDP10 to my house. For those who have never seen a KL10, it is an enormous beast. Two 23-inch racks and one 19-inch rack, all bolted together, with dozens of cables running back and forth (i.e. the PDP11s unibus runs from the front-end processor in the right-most rack, all the way to the IO cabinet in the left-most rack, and all the way back to the right-most rack to pick up the TU56es). So, seperating the cabinets is a MAJOR chore that I was unwilling to take so late in the day.
In the bottom of the center rack is the 13 kilowatt power supply for the ECL cage. The whole thing is VERY heavy - at least 1000 pounds.
It is also wider than the lift-gate on the truck.
With great difficulty, using shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, causing one non-life threatening injury, we get the computer out onto the lift gate, with the IO and FE cabinets hanging off the ends, but the center of gravity (thanks to DEC's decision to use an enormous FR transformer) well centered.
But once we get it on the ground, it won't budge. The 3-inch casters were designed to roll over smooth machine-room floors, not asphalt suburban driveways.
My intrepid friend Charles suggests we have a 300 horespower diesel-powered computer-tug right here. So, with the judicious application of ablative books (one on Songwriting, and a copy of the UCSD P-System Report) we carefullyback the truck up, so the edge of the lift-gate is bearing on the steel of the FE cabinet.
Charles gets into the truck, shifts into low-Reverse, and eases out on the clutch. Slowly everything begins to move, but when the computer jumps the bump from the driveway into the garage, the terrain became MUCH smoother, and it began accelerating. I rush from my vantage point at the FRONT of the mission, to the back, and LITERALLY throw myself between the advancing computer and the AMPEX memory box. I have the wind knocked out of me, but no broken bones, and the computer seemed to survive.
Ask me some other time about how I nearly killed my friend Josh by trying to drop a fully loaded SparcCenter 2000 on him.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
There's a cray YMP at the collage I attend. Each drive CONTROLLER is in its own 6 foot high case. The power supply, a generator that is 12ft wide and 8 feet high, not to mention the cooling system. Until you've seen that setup you don't know the meaning of "big iron".
I know of a college in Arizona that decided to move it's IBM servers and harddrive rack to their new location across campus. A friend of mine who worked there suggested they have IBM do it.Reasoning with them that it's fragile and doesn't take much to break.
Well they didn't follow his advice. They carefull loaded and moved it. Nothing looked broken. They hooked everything up and nothing. What they didn't realize was that the hard drives needed the arms put in a parked position. They didn't know that, and the hard drives were trashed. The warranty didn't cover that type of damage.
oops...
In the '70's, I worked for a timesharing company called National CSS. NCSS was a very cool place, not at all a traditional computer services company. There were scads of really sharp propellor-heads, all of whom today would be (and some of whom are) deep Linux hackers. We had our own operating system running on IBM mainframe hardware, a highly-evolved descendent of CP/CMS called VP/CSS. We had a kick-ass packet switching network spanning the globe, with PDP 11's as network nodes, and we rented interactive computer time to just about every major company for on-line data mining, prototyping, what-if analysis, etc. NCSS was a constant thorn in IBM's side; for you youngsters, IBM was the Microsoft of the era :). At the time, a big TSO customer might squeeze 30-50 online users on a 370/158, whereas we could run 150+ users on the same machine.
Anwyay, we bought a big Amdahl, I believe a 470/V7, and it showed up one day on a truck, outside our data center. The pallets needed to be shifted from the truck up onto the data center floor. As the forklift picked up the first load, the bright director of engineering wondered aloud "What happens if they drop it?" The observers started wondering about who covered the insurance for moving the system from the truck into our premises. After a few anxious looks, the delivery was stopped, and some phone calls made. Turns out the shipper covered it to the curb, and our in-house insurance covered it once it was on the floor, but NOBODY was covering the transition.
After some hurried calls, something like $50K was pledged to Lloyd's for a 24-hour $3M policy covering this very short-haul move. (The dollars might be wrong, and it might not have been Lloyd's. But you get the idea.)
At the end of the process, the system came up and all was well, and Amdahl had a great new reference site running a non-IBM operating system. But it was a good lesson in anticipating troubles.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I work as a process engineer building the circut boards that go into your computers. Now when we ship stuff we really ship BIG stuff.
One of the best ones I've had the experiance of reciving is a ChipShooter ( Big gatling gun type of machine that places R's and C's at about one every 0.08 seconds ). One of these big babies weigh in at the multi ton range and is about 24' long by about 12' wide. Now it should be noted that our shipper did strap this babie in. But the truker did hear a loud bang in the trailer just as he was leaving New York. But decided to not go and investigate. You need to remember the truker gets paid for delivery so he decided to not inspect seeing that the cargo was insured. Any ways he arives at our dock and we open the back doors and it seems that the staps had snapped. So for the entire trip from New York to Austin this very big machine was basicly sliding around the back of the truck. It actualy poked a hole in the side of the truck at one point. So we take pictures of it as recieved and unload it ( which takes multiple fork lifts as just one can't handle the length/weight ). After opeing the crate up it was descovered that the machine was bent all out of shape. So our supplier shipped us another one and filled a insurance claim on the one that shipped. The insurance ended up paying out a 600K claim!
Another funny one! We ordered a pick and place machine this time ( used to place flatpacks and BGA's ). The supplier decided to ship the unit to there local warhouse and uncrate it them selfs. From there warehouse they shipped it to us on a flatbed trailer. Well as the truck is pulling in to our drivway he cut the corner and the trailer hit a tree. Well Seeing that trees have these things sticking out of them called limbs. One of these limbs became loged into the machine and ripped the machine right off the truck. And the truck driver did'nt even notice this. he pulls into our recieving dock gets out and has the dumb struck look on his face (he can't seem to figure out where the machine was ). We point him toward the drive way and the totaly destroyed machine laying on the ground! I think this por truck driver got fired over it.
Back when I was working at a large southeastern university, the Math/CS dept. ordered a SC2000 from Sun. It was shipped by FedEx (w/o insurance) and it was delivered by one FedEx guy who tried to roll it on the truck lift. As it was going down it tipped over and fell onto the ground. It was crushed by its own weight.
It took about a month of negotiations before Sun would replace it with a new one. Mainly because there was no FedEx shipping. After that all shipments came via Viking in the US. I wonder why?
-hh
We bid for (and won) a Sun E420-R on Ebay. Not exactly "big iron", but more substantial than the average server. The seller (who shall remain nameless) was a reasonably large dealer, and had high feedback ratings (not anymore :-)).
The box arrived via FedEx. No visible damge on the outside, but inside it was destroyed. The front panel was cracked, and the entire contents of box had somehow shifted forward, so the ports in the back were almost flush with the sheet metal. Inside, we could see how the brackets that held the motherboard assembly were actually bent from the impact.. Anyone who has seen the inside of a Sun box knows it's not like a Taiwan clone -- you don't just whip out the vice-grip pliers and twist it back into shape.
Now the fun begins. We call the seller, who basically gives us the runaround, stating that this is really a FedEx shipping damage claim and should be handled as such. Even though we paid for shipping, the seller is FedEx's customer for this transaction, so they have to initiate the claim (not us). As an added bonus, the morons who shipped the package underinsured it (5K instead of 10K, even though we paid for the full coverage). Then FedEx drags their feet for about two months before they actually have someone come out and inspect the damage. I'm getting really nervous at this point, because I have $10K tied up in what is now junkware. FedEx saw that the shipper did a crappy job of packing and denied the claim. FedEx is right, the packing was piss-poor. On the other hand, the box absorbed tremendous force -- how much packing material would it take to make a difference? Packing issues aside, FedEx's foot dragging was costing us time and money. It may have been within their rights to deny the claim, but their lack of prompt investigation was inexcusable.
In the end, the seller refunded the money, and allegedly fired the idiot who handled the shipment. My unsubstantiated guess is that someone was not merely mispacking the shipments; they may have been pocketing the money that was supposed to pay for full insurance. The problem was solved, but not before a few lessons were learned. We had very little recourse against anyone except the seller, and they could have easily screwed us with relative impunity.
The last REAL job I worked for (before consulting) was support
programming for a printed circuit board signal integrity simulator.
HP was interested in the software and shipped us a RISC workstation
for the port. This was in 1992.
Turned out it was kind of a behind the scenes effort- they shipped us
an early prototype box, and the engineer who packed it had grabbed
some random styrofoam blocks and a sturdy looking box. When it
arrived, the box was upside down, the CPU pizzabox had slipped out of
the styrofoam and was bouncing around the bottom of the shipping box.
It was dinged hard enough that the power button was immobilized and
the hard drive was banging around loose inside.
In horror, I called the HP engineer. His response: "Huh. Did you try
turning it on?" We did, and it booted immediately.
I can't find my favorite (it's in a collection of computer horror stories I misplaced), but here's a few from old Symbolics lore. The first is available in a few places on the net, the second is probably only on SMBX.
T306 Tales
3600s Come to Austin War StoriesWell as I once played escort to a box on an airplane, I can answer this all important question. The airlines actually offer a class of ticket without a meal for just this situation. Imagine my surprise. Supposedly my company saved 5 dollars on the ticket that way.
What is much more fun is to get it through security. I would hate to try it with security the way it is now. As it was it took a couple hours of searching and wierd questions. I don't think you could even do it nowadays.
2 spicey dudes were tasked to figure out if
these computer things could help a NYC
Utility with thier billing.
One was focused on Unisys the other on IBM
Both came back and said "Sure it will work"
Well to hedge their bets they bought one of each.
Well the Unisys machine came and my dad had to
rip a wall out of the building in lower Manhatten, and using a crane got the computer installed.
The IBM machine arrived and was brought up on the freight elevator.
Well the Unisys never worked and the IBM iron did. The Unisys iron was hacked up and tossed into a dumpster.
When my dad retired 30 years later the guy tasked with Unisys still had the same job position as he did when he said "Yea Sure", the guy tasked with IBM was a senior VP
The only moral I extracted from this story from my dad was "If you totally FK UP then you better quit rather then hang around and hope for another chance".
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
A few years back I worked for an ISP, and we were taking delivery of a new fully stocked 19" rack (I think it had 4 servers, a cisco catalyst and some other assorted goodies in it, we purchased it like that so we wouldn't have to rig it all up ourselves).
So the day arrives that our New Shiny Hardware(tm) is going to come in (and the tech geeks, me included, are busy salivating all over the place).
A rather tiny courier van comes driving up, and this insanely small-built guy gets out. We're already like "um, that can't be right.. noooo they didn't ship it in there did they?".
Well, they did. No packing. No strap-down. They took the rack and put it (front down) into the van. The "pick it up and shove it in" way. When it came out, at least 3 face plates were gone, our catalyst had a dent in it that unfortunately crushed a part of the logic boards inside, and the rack itself was torqued and wouldn't stand straight. If you'd try to stand it up, it'd wobble. And sway. And fall over.
We got fully reimbursed and a few people actually lost their jobs due to the way it got shipped, but it still amazes me that it was done so carelessly.
On a more personal note; I've traveled back and forth between the Netherlands (I'm a native.. fear my cheese) and the USA a few times, and shipped my trusty PC along 4 times. (there 2 times, and back 2 times).
My routine for shipping:
1) Disassemble PC. Take harddrives (3) and wrap them in bubble wrap, then pack them in a small box, add padding. Take drives with you as carry-on luggage. (After 9/11, I doubt this'd be allowed).
2) Cut out styrofoam blocks to a size where you can basically secure the motherboard (i.e. make sure at least the edges are going to stay off the motherboard, and if you can, make sure the center don't hit it either. Secure all cards, and tie-wrap all loose cables together and out of the way.
Double box this.
3) Take monitor. Take off foot stand. Double-box monitor using the original shipping materials, or basically anything else that's sturdy enough. (Styrofoam cut to decent sized blocks. For the double-boxing, use liberal amounts of foam peanuts to fill the space.
Insure the whole deal.
On my last return trip, I lacked packing material so I ended up double-boxing and having my monitor wrapped inside a real big blanket. It did work, and the only damage that I got was that apparently someone spilled their coffee on it because i got the monitor back with an interesting array of brown stains on it.
*shrug*
There is no sig...
Actually, as far as current supercomputers go, the Cray T3E isn't near the top of the line. Going on what I was told by the systems admin at the ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (basically a building filled with rooms and rooms of supercomputers), the Cray T3E isn't any longer very useful to them with the scope of what kind of processing they were doing. They even had a redhat beowulf cluster running on those dell corporate pc's that outperformed it in tests (fewer than 256 of them, which they had originally, as they had to give a large number of them back).
He said they were currently looking for a buyer, and that all it was currently doing was sitting in the room impressing people who don't know better. I sure as heck was impressed, and if I had a few million sitting around, would have probably made an offer, though...
I know cuz I used to be one.
Many art shippers (especially in the Bay area) have decided to make some extra cash by shipping high end computers.
What they have is climate controlled storage, employees who know how to blanket wrap and strap down somethig valuable, trucks with air ride suspension and they always travel with two or more workers.
The employees don't look upon anything that is shipped as an appliance but assume that it is worth alot and that their job security depends on it being delivered in good shape.
There's different kinds of computers for different kinds of needs. Anything that is easily done in parallel and is only computational(not memory) bound is easily solved with racks of P3's or Athlons.
Certain kinds of problems that are memory bandwidth intensive will run extremely well on computers such as the Cray T3E because that's basically what they were built for. However, you cannot dismiss the shear power of the Cray.
Your example is either a folks tale or mere disinformation. Even if they were OC'd Dell dual P3 Xeons, there's no way a fully equiped T3E wouldn't beat it in every single benchmark. Assuming the application or benchmark was compiled with optimizations for the platform.
The T3E is built in a very seperate, modular fashion. Not all Crays are built the same. There's also many very nice advantages to writing code for a supercomputer:
Message passing in threaded applications is so simple, there's nothing easier. The compiler kicks serious arse. You get native 64bit memory mapping.
Then again, the T3E is old school even at Cray. They've got much cooler stuff coming out right now.
If you've got the mandwidth and a half an hour of time, I suggest you take a look at the Good Shit. [MPEG/400MB]
I think I want one.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.