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?"
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!!!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 StoriesI 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.