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The Most Dangerous Server Rooms
Ymerej writes "The Register has an article on dangerous server rooms. Have you seen worse?" Perhaps The Register would like a picture of my desk if they really want to be scared.
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. . .where the city rats are bigger than the IT guys.
And they carry card keys.
-bpl
Now that's how you ensure job security!
- tristan
calling application programmers rats is insulting to rats, Pls refer to them by their proper designation...(L)Users :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
My server room is so bad not even the rats will go in there
For example, statistics show that people who work in server room almost never catch any STDs. I wonder why that is...
Actually, this is the third article about the subject.
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
My apartment is less clean and harder to navigate.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
One of my favourites was actually sitting inside a motor control center, with all sorts of high voltage DC motor starters right behind the main computer terminal. Don't lean back.
ed
It's all about removing floor tiles and then forgetting to set up warning cones. The clearance between our tiles and the concrete floor underneath is a good 4 or 5 feet; I would not want to fall stiff-legged into that.
Interesting side note: apparently finding high-priced Cisco gear not connected to anything is not that uncommon. I've also heard horror stories of guy that traced a cable my hand(toner was on the fritz) that looped 4 times around the data center but wasn't hooked up to shit, on either end. Took him an entire afternoon.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Don't worry about the wiring , where are the lights ?
Check it out here.
;-)
This is by far to custom case I've ever seen.
Look a bit dangerous though
I'm a slob; I admit it. Even if I didn't, it would be obvious from the way I dress and the state of my desk. But at my job, I am cleaning up the spaghetti mess in the ceiling and trying to lay the wire cleanly from patch panels - switches.
Documenting connections has a real payoff in troubleshooting. But doing stuff on aesthetic grounds is a harder sell. I have a gut sense that a clean layout is important even if you know the destination both ends of a wire whose middle runs through a snarl. Here's what I came up with:
my version of the community policing broken windows theory.
It's psychologically harder to do slipshod, shoddy work if everything around you has been done well. And it's hard to do a proper job if everything else is slipshod. As a matter of housemate politics, it's easier to leave the nth dirty dish in the sink than the first. You are only adding an increment, not changing state.
Doing the Right Thing is contagious. At least, it is among folks I care to work with. Doing the Wrong Thing is catching, too. Morale is higher and people challenge themselves more at a shop that is run well.
That's how I pitched it, and my boss bought it.
You want scary:
Our server room has wobbly floors and tower cases stacked 2 high sitting in the middle of a 16'x16' room, with the more important servers sitting on the top.
We also got a new air conditioner that has an electronic switch and we have problems with brown outs. So in the middle of the summer, the power goes out and the A/C doesn't come back on, usually on a weekend too.
One more thing: brace yourself:
We use Windows servers with IIS!!!!!!!!
A company I worked for a few years ago had 6 cabinets. 3 of them were full of nice relion rack mounts The other three were pilled full to the top with desktop style servers. Most of them had the case sides taken off. All of them were just stacked on each other, three going one way, the next three turned 90 degrees and so on. The very first rack had two BigIPs and all the switches. So some cables were strung through 5 racks to get to the switches.
...but one Xserve could probably replace the whole mess in some of those pictures.
about 3 years ago, I was pulling cable from 1 room to another.. while standing on a ladder pulling the cable out of the cieling, the cieling collapsed on me! About half the tiles from the room fell on to the floor, and a florescent light hit me in the back on its way down.. that's pretty dangerous!
Name says it all!
As a long time Customer Engineeer for a major manufacture, I've had my share of basement computer rooms and all the subsequent flooding thereof. That being said, my favourite customer had a mainframe in the basement of his 100 year old private house. He was running a time share (remember those) system over 300 baud modems. To enter the place one had to walk beside his wifes pottery kiln. However once inside a really excellent air conditioned room there was the beast, a brand new HP3000 series 2 with 500Mb of disk. He was my favourite because on my first after hours preventive maintenance call - in fact it was the first time I had ever seen the place - his wife called out after a couple of hours.." Phil, dinner is ready !"
Semper ubi sub ubi
Check this out:
;)
www.theregister.co.uk/media/926.jpg
That's a HELL of a case mod
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
I was in a large shared server facility that still used a Halon system, which when released, fills the area suffocating the fire (and any living creatures in the area as well).
Anyway, one day we were working in our cage, when we heard a warning alarm, and saw all the employees running for their lives. Not knowing that the alarm meant the Halon system was about to be activiate, we joined in anyway and ran for the emergency exits.
It turned out the fire alarms were set off by accident by someone drilling and creating dust, and luckily the people on-site disabled the fire supression system before it went off.
_______
2B1ASK1
In rural Indiana, you don't always have space to have a whole room devoted to servers and network equipment, ya know?! But I was still surprised when I visited my former ISPs local point of presence - in one of their employee's one and only bathroom at his house. Photo here. Do some laundry, take a dump, watch some network traffic go by. Uh-huh.
is going on here. That photo on the main page this article links to is the same one that George Ziemann has on his site from the Ebay Vs. Musician article earlier.
I don't see any indication that this is supposed to be his server room. So who's lying?
It's all going according to
...looks like some new cybernetic monster I imagine will make an appearance in Doom 3.
At my last job we had a network of about 600 local users. Our server room had two racks of equiment on the building's ups, so the racks plugged right into the wall.
:-)
One day we had a broom leaning up against the wall next to two of our cabinet's. Someone bumped the broom, which fell in the long arc that brooms do when they fall along a wall when leaning. One the way, it happened to unplug our two cabinets from the wall. So much for uptime. The place when quiet and we all just stared at each other for a few seconds. This is in an envirnment where downtime isn't really tolerated at all.
Our task the next weekend?
We took a whole package of zip ties, loosened up the plug wall plate, zip tied the plugs around the back of the outlet wall plate with an ungodly amount of zip ties, and screwed the wall plate tight again.
Our version of 120volt twist locks.
Was interesting to hear what people would ask after seeing it for the first time.
Not quite the server room from hell, but the story's on topic.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
That first picture looks like a cross between something out of a Terry Gilliam movie, a Borg Cube and Tetsuo the Iron Man. The ones at the bottom are just plain bizarre.
These aren't servers, they're representative works of art- kind of like a city. Granted, these servers will die the same flaming death that Chicago did in the great fire, but it's still kind of neat.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
You want dangerous, well the only fire prevention we have for our 23 servers, is one halon extinguisher. So if the room goes up, we can save it, as long as we don't want any oxygen...
Xaotik Designs
I'm messy by nature, but I know that as long as I'm the only person who understands the mess, I'm indispensable
And I got a new job yesterday... I pity my successor
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
... when my foot broke through one of those floor tiles in the server room. Funny, someone told me they were high resistence, that must not be exactly the case ;)
That doesn't surprise me. I have a strange feeling many of you have been caught doing this in front of your pc.
So much for my Delta Force keyboard layout ;)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
For those with more disposable income, as long as they keep the Cherry 2000 model out of the water, everything should be fine.
I bet he's the guy that invented tcpdump.
We launched a website with publicity on a live primetime TV show about the internet (in the UK), while the server (singular) was still running under my desk. It was a little while before we moved it out of there and, amazingly, I never accidentally shut down the site with my knee.
Of course, when we did, eventually, move it into a server room, the aircon subsequently broke down and, being an underfunded dotcom, nobody wanted to spring for repairs. We lost at least one server that way (thankfully not a live-facing one).
Our main wiring closet looks a little like the 'not so bad examples' of wiring closets in those pictures - though nothing like the more extreme ones.
The problem is, once the thing gets into that kind of mess, you rarely have the chance to bring down the entire network to repatch all the cables and cable tie them into some kind of order.
Not only that, but if you have loads of trunks and VLAN's configured, putting it all back in the right order can be a total ballache!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
to ensure it could withstand the island's regular earthquakes
... yeah ... we just had a 6.2 earthquake and we're rebuilding the server room", then he gave a kinda "is he serious?/boy am I embarassed" pause and gave me his professional opinion: "Oh, okay, that might be the problem." And then the fucking dial-up users. They're on the TV saying We know there has been an earthquake, please do not call the police to tell them there has been an earthquake, try to use the phone for emergencies only!. And our users are trying to get on freaking AOL instant messenger via dial-up. I was half expecting them to say "Oh yeah, I tried to dial in and it doesn't work. The phone works fine because I just called the police to tell them there was an earthquake."
Has anyone else been in a non-earthquake-prone place and then had an earthquake? Here at work our server room was completely unprepared for an earthquake. Some of the machines came off the racks, some of the whole racks fell, our T1s got damaged or disconnected somewhere in the process. The whole disaster showed us how stupid some users can be. First, the T1 provider calls from Boston or something, "Duh, we show that your T1 lines are down, blah blah blah..", "Uh
Anyway, we bolted down all the racks, shame on us for not doing it in the first place.
These messes are on par with an average recording studios. At least in the studio you can see sparks leap from the microphone at the guitarist.
Statistics also show that "server room affairs" by non technical personal, are responsible for more than half of office place STD transmission.
The "photo copy room trysts" follow in a close second place, while the "boss's office boinkings" are becoming more uncommon as more CEOs are of the female gender.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Think you're safe when you've got your computer room all tidy and clean?
Forget it. We had a problem with the airconditioning at a medium size company in Delft which had it's heat-outlets on the top of the roof.
These outlets were not so well protected to cold as was shown two years ago when, after a freezingly cold weekend we came into the server room and it was really boiling hot. Problem was the huge ventilators on the roof were stuck frozen.
It was the only time we had all windows and doors open in the middle of winter. But this cold could well have started a fire.
sig not found
I get a call from the folks on the 5th floor saying there's water coming out from under the door (they don't have access to the room). Being the onsite telephony person, I rush up wondering what the hell is going on. Sure enough, water has soaked the carpet around the door. Opening the door I see as much as 5cm (2in) of water sitting around the base of the switch and various servers connected to the switch. All in all, probably around $300K worth of equipment, and I don't dare go in, because there are power cords lying in the water. Finally get the power turned off, the water out, clean everything up. All in all, costed us a couple hundred dollars for some new cables, one monitor, and various odds and ends.
Apparently what happened was someone on the next floor up was in a bathroom, turned on a faucet and forgot about it. The water managed to move about 5m (15ft) down the hall before deciding to pour out into our telephony room!
I work in industrial maintenance and the most interesting electrical problems happen when the weather changes.
120VAC isn't too bad. Connections soaked in water might survive for a while until the corrosion finally breaks it down, melts the wirenuts, etc. Getting shocked by it isn't enough to blow your fingertips off. 240 volts is usually just 110 volts split into two phases, so it doesn't present any worse of a problem. 480 volts is another story...
480 volts gets interesting when the humidity rises and gets absorbed by the dust surrounding breakers and other switching components. Often, it will flash across the phases, vaporizing the debris, and mysteriously tripping the breaker. No one will figure this out until they happen to take a close look at the wiring, and the humidy from their breath will illuminate the brightest flash they have ever seen in their lives.
I'll have to drag my camera up into my attic to take a picture of the mess up there one day. I've 3 machines that run 24/7 up there, covered in dust, various other crap and spiders (and boy do those spiders grow big up there!)
I put them up there as I got sick of the noise, then ran ethernet cabling down to sockets around the place. My main web server (see sig) has been happily running up there for about 1 1/2 years now - barring the odd upgrade. It's not pleasant to open up a case full of dust and cobwebs, BTW!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Some of the more complex and heafty NOC's I've heard about actually have halon, or similarly based fire prevention systems for the entire room. Auto sealing doors and the works. The old "you have 20 seconds to exit the room" plot device brought to life.
Well, that's sorta the whole point of halon (and thus, why isn't used anymore.)
Those are nothing. NOTHING, I tell you!
I've got a set of routers located in a crawlspace where the only way to get to them is to walk across boards spanning small metal beams that were put in to hold a suspended false ceiling. One missed step and you'll drop right through the ceiling, AND IT'S A 2 STORY DROP! Once I dropped a power pack while replacing it and nearly killed a gal working below. Power pack exploded like a bomb when it hit.
We recently had a "security audit" where they recommended we should mount those routers in a locked cabinet for increased security. Not a mention about the boards, lack of handrail, safety net, etc. Heck, who needs a locked cabinet? Just remove one of the boards and NO ONE can get to those routers, not even the people who are supposed to maintain them!
Back when we used thinnet one of the managers didn't like stringing new coax through the building whenever we remodeled or moved people, so he had us cut all the coaxes to length PLUS 25 FEET! He figured if someone moved we could pull back the excess and save time. The cables all terminated in what came to be called the spaghetti room, from the coils of coax all over the floor. We had to step over all the coaxes to get to the routers and hubs. Eventually, the coaxes got damaged from all the abuse and had to be cut off to length anyway, but for several years it was a serious tripping hazard for anyone who entered that room.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
I've been in two datacenters where there were regularly spaced 'emergency air supply' masks, right next to the regularly spaced fire extinguishers.
Not sure how well they would work in a room full of smoke and halon, but I suppose you could run from station to station, and then somehow pry open the massive firedoor...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
My personal favorite was building a small network out in a field. We set up our four machines [286's] in the dirt, got our power from a generator being towed by a five-ton and wired together on a 10Base2 network. For the first day or so the only shelter we had for the machines was a tarp that we pulled over them when it started to rain.
Lying on the ground, underneath the leaky tarp, hoping that I did not get electrocuted, or if I did that I would not be held accountable for the damaged equipment [trust me, this was not my idea], I decided that re-enlistment was not a great idea.
[former] USMC geek
I just knew there was a punchline there that I was totally missing out on. Damn. Thanks for that. :)
If our IT depatment let out infrastructure degrade to anything close to that I would terminate the lot. These are representations of unprofessional half-assed setups. There is no justifiable reason for these examples. A small investment of time and an operational plan prevents this. These managers should be hung.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
That's right you read that correctly.
I once visited a client who had his server racks in an old lockerroom shower. This would not have been so bad except when one of my co-workers leaned against the wall and hit the valve we discovered that the pipes hadn't been capped by just had the shower heads removed....that's right three full racks of equipment in a live shower. =)
Pennywise the Clown is my sysadmin.
I was told this story from a reliable source...
An HP technician (yup they have at least one) was restoring the data to a customer's fileserver but the backup software was asking for tape#2. The customer only ever had one backup tape that they recalled, so they were quite perplexed until the security guard entered the server room...
Apparently every morning around 3am when he made his rounds he found the backup server screen blinking "insert next tape" -- The security guard proudly said that he was pushing in the tape for at least six months now...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
you remind me of when i tell electrician stories about the battery plant we hooked up.
:)
480 vs 110 ?
yeah ill put your lil lights in it only 110
I work for a network consulting company, so I've seen some pretty funny stuff in the last few years. Here are some right off the top of my head:
One company didn't order a rack mount kit for their KVM switch (some Belkin model), so they duct taped it to the main monitor. No subtle tape loops under the KVM..... they wrapped the tape three or four times around the KVM and the monitor.
Another company was remodeling their server room but neglected to move the servers somewhere else. There was an inch and a half of drywall and sawdust on top of all the network equipment and servers. The circuit boards looked like it had snowed on them.
I'm doing an audit on some systems. I see a motherboard sitting in a cardboard tray (the kind you get when you purchase a 24-pack of Coke from Costco), along with a hard drive, floppy, power supply and network card. No case. No cooling. Turns out it was their PDC and print server. That's quality craftsmanship.
This isn't about server rooms, per-se, but I did some work for a national pizza chain. They had modems at a central site that were supposed to make a phone call to the stores to print out order tickets. We were sent to figure out why they weren't printing. At one site, the printer was on the floor next to the prep counter where they add the toppings. Someone had spilled a good quart of marinara sauce into the printer. They gave the outside of the printer a good once over, but the inside was just nasty.
We were sent out to troubleshoot a voice-over-IP problem at a garden nursery. We arrive on site and lo and behold, there was a dead rat on top of the router. It didn't have anything to do with the problem, but it sure was unexpected.
I love when people don't properly plan their electrical power consumption in their server rooms. I walked into some company's server room, plugged in my laptop to the rack mounted power strip, turned it on, and blew the breaker for two racks of servers.
I watched a wireless network installer gob Liquid Nails onto the back of an Aironet access point and stick it to the ceiling. I hope they never want to upgrade that particular access point.
Any other good stories?
These are actually pretty common. I remember the university's data center was like this, there were 3 large red buttons that would temporarily stop the halon release so that you could get out or do something to the servers before the room was flooded. My current employers datacenter sadly had only high temp overhead sprinklers, by the time they go off its more about saving the building as the servers are already slag.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This brings back memories.
I remember working at an isp way back when and the server room was so bad that you could basically lean on the rats nest of wiring like it was a makeshift hammock.
Walking around behind the racks meant being completely aware of which line you put tension on, lest it knock some connector not fastened down out of place.
A couple of weeks ago I came accross a couple of photograps of actual telephone exchanges in the streets of Beirut. You just wouldn't believe it, and it took me a few seconds to understand the picture. there were so many wires that you can hardly see the box behind -- kinda like Johnny Mnemonic, except with 10x more wires, and 2 or 3 handsets plugged in seemingly random (or probably not) outlets. I'll post again if I can find it back.
...until it's so cluttered that you can't get to the shutoff switch for the FM2000.
I would love to see what this person could do with Christmas tree lights
I've got one, heard from an old-timer friend of mine who used to be a field rep (and, at other times, an AIX kernel coder) for some of IBM's big iron.
The situation: The client's systems are crashing, on a regular basis, for no understandable reason. No remote diagnostics work, so they send out my friend.
He gets to the server room, and keeps thinking he's seeing things out the corner of his eye. He tells everyone to leave the room, and turns out the lights. The room glows.
The server room at this place was sitting under a huge radar system. (He had some additional explanation -- used to be a physics major -- but I didn't entirely follow it). They moved the equipment (a substantial undertaking!) and the problem went away.
I have always thought that how organized a companies wiring is - is a direct reflection of the staff that works there.
I know that when i moved into one company in Redwood City - the network wsa a nightmare. We had rooms that looke like that - but over the next 2 years we replaced almost every wire on that network - and demanded budget for proper closet setups - and got it.
We eliminated all those closets that looked like that, and learned one hell of a lot in the process.
I think that if your closets look like that - you are asking for fire - and it shows just how lazy you really are. No arguments of "I'm too busy" allowed - it just means your a lazy slob period.
Wimp. We've got nothing but water sprinklers hooked into the main sensors. So if htere's a fire anyplace in the building the servers go for a swim.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
For a moment I thought I was looking at a preview shot of Virus II the sequel.
Who gets paid to produce messes like these, and how much?
Can you imagine what it would look like if the same methodology were applied to coding? Maybe it is...and if so, it's no wonder bad things happen (bugs, project failures, etc).
I've heard of a major British ferry operating company who doesn't mess about with halon in their datacentre. They simply cut the power then drench the kit in water - evidently they can stand the amount of downtime required to dry it out again :)
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Check this out. Just happened today!
Why are those who are neat at work are slobs at home, and those who are neat at home, are slobs at work?
in college i was doing some work in our computer center pulling cable under a presurized floor. it was your standard room of ancient large blue IBM 72" tall units. arranged in classic grid.
then a maintence crew working on something in an attached room did something to start a small fire.
half my body is under the floor -- head first. trying to unknot some cable.
i didnt know anything about the halion (sp?) gas until the rescue worker explained it to me.
i should have sued, but was worried about pizza money from my job.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Taiwanese typhoon? pfffft. Come on - lets get some webcams in these dangerous server rooms and then /. em for some good old fashioned geek fireworks.
Yeah - you know you want to.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
then accountants with key cards could not be rats, just simply bean-counters, (another demographic group to toy with MWAHAHAHA! )
:)
What's your (l)username?...ok...**clickety click** Why thank you for increasing our IT budget by 1 billion$...now i'm afraid you'll have to go. Do me a favor and check if the pover is on, just stick a piece of metal in the mains... You won't feel a thing
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
There wasn't enough visible pr0n in the room for a SYN flood joke.
...or the electrician dropping a wrench inside a power room at one of Bell Canada's largest CO's. The short and resulting fire (and halon response) took out about 25% of their capacity in the entire city of Toronto for hours.
I had lots of fun (was at a wireless carrier at the time) chatting with the switch techs about how they'd distribute our traffic over the remaining circuits.
We just built a new server room and the raised floor tiles are in and of themselves dangerous -- sheet metal covering concrete, 2 ft x 2ft. They must weight 40 lbs each, I wonder who the first person to drop one on their feet will be. I've already taken out some chunks of the newly painted wallboard in the course of swapping solid tiles for ones with grommeted holes.
The installer told me it was a good flooring system, but I wish it wasn't concrete. It takes a special coring machine to put round holes, square cuts require a wet-cut bandsaw.
They're both in the billing office. I tried making them lethal so no one would touch them, espcially considering the boss's kids seem to think the 2000 server should be used for chatting up their friends via AIM and has no other purpose. Unfortunatly, reguardless of the mass of cables running in to the hub next to it and the fact I attempt to hid any interface devices they still seem to muck with it whenever they have a half day from school. I think I'll just set up a mine field around it and call it a day.
Luckily they've never found a use for the SCO box other than looking at it with a wrinkled nose. I do too, mind you, but for entirely different reasons I would guess.
Work in the server room?
come on.
: )
Washington State has a significant history of major earthquakes. It is part of the pacific ring of fire. See the USGS site here But really, you have to ask yourself, what are you going to do when Mt Ranier blows and your server farrm is buried under 1 Million tons of liquid hot magma?
Actually, it isn't used any more because it was found to be ozone-depleting and banned by international agreement.
p ://palimpsest.stanford.edu/waac/wn/wn15/wn15-2 /wn15-208.html
http://www.haifire.com/press/halon_rep.htm
htt
Several of the ozone-friendly replacements (I forget their unfriendly alphanumeric designations) still work by sucking all of the oxygen out ofthe room.
How about this?
-no fire suppression system. Period. White Plains City Fire Marshall threw a shit fit, threatened to shut the entire place down, but then conveniently forgot about it.
-could not hear the BUILDING fire alarms from inside the room (there were fire alarm annunciators inside the server room for the building system, but they did not work)
Our landlord was a sleazeball who cut every corner and did as little as possible...and probably paid off the City of White Plains, NY fire inspector. The elevators were death traps, too, but what did the landlord care? His office was on the first floor, with a parking space right next to the door- handicapped spaces 100 feet away, and blocked off.
kinda makes me want to start redesigning my company's server room to get into the register.
this might be one of the cruelest ways to enable job insuarance...
i used to work in a server room like this..i remember talking to the guy that replaced the Halon and maintaned the system.."Ok so..ive got a certain number of seconds to get out...or i won't be able to breathe...right..no problem"
A friend of mine used to be a contractor for Navistar at their engine block casting plant. One of the computers on the factory floor was so close to a stream of molten metal that he had a hard time sitting at the computer. He could take only so much heat. It would also pop and shoot sparks at him. He had a large set of shirts that were already ruined that he wore to work. They had little holes burned in them from hot things.
Similarly, I worked for a computer rental company in central florida years ago. We had an original IBM PC at a phosphorous surface strip-mining facility. The parking lot had showers for your car that you had to go through when you left. The black bezels on the front of the case were bleached to a nice light off-white grey by chemicals floating in the air.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Particularly given that Rats are in the order Rodentia, and Kangaroos are in the order Diprotodontia.
I guess they are lawyers though...
Worked in the door, lighting(480V) and alarm control rooms in Corcran State Prison. Its where they keep Charles Manson and the like. 'Nuf said.
that's not actually "fun" though, is it?
that's a different thing that we call WORK
when you learn the difference, you'll be allowed to stay up late, drink beer and talk to ladies (!), and you'll no longer have to watch every episode of Star Trek.
That was classic intercourse!
Lots of software is the equivilant of those pictures. The only problem is that you can't see that from the pretty pictures on the box cover. Instead you see it in crashes and strange behavior. Two things cause it, first unskilled careless workers, second stressed workers in unrealistic situations. The second seems to be more previlant. They guy who wired that first mess probably knew that its better to label everything and run it down the side of the rack to the gutter in the floor (notice the one rack is accually nicely wired under the mess on top). Instead you have the manager who gives you 1 day to wire up 100 computers, or 1 week to add some big feature to the code base. The result is scrambling like mad and a "just plug it in and make it work don't make it pretty" attitude.
I haven't seen a mess of wires like that since the Borg took Picard!
Borg Cube
Live web cams
IT nerd in bar: Hey, baby, you like dangerous guys?
Hot Chick: Yeah, I guess so.
IT nerd in bar: Sometimes I take my pocket protector out of my pocket!
Hot Chick: Uh-huh...
IT nerd in bar: Sometimes I take my mint condition Megatron action figure to LAN parties!
Hot Chick: Uh-huh...
IT nerd in bar: And sometimes I let my server room get really messy so that it's a hazard to my life!
Hot Chick: Wow, that is dangerous. I'm really turned on...hop on me right now...
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
I'm sure that some of you have worked in large server rooms with a big red emergency power shutoff button on the wall...
:)
At my old university, one of these server rooms was emptied as new, smaller hardware came available and the room was no longer needed. They turned this room into an office for a student organization... leaving the large red button, but taking the "Emergency Shutoff" sign.
This unlabeled button sat neglected on the wall of this little office for about 7 or 8 years until one day a curious student just had to find out what the button did...
The network for all of the engineering schools at this university of 36,000 students went down for most of a day..
The best part is that the button is still in the little office with the students, and it is still unlabeled yet fully functional... They did hide it behind a file cabinet, though
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I was in a large shared server facility that still used a Halon system, which when released, fills the area suffocating the fire (and any living creatures in the area as well).
Look -- geeks sue for the wrong kind of keyboard -- ergonomics = safety after all -- do you really think there is just this dangerous gas ready to be released where you work and you have exactly 20 seconds to escape before you die?
Taken from the first site that came up on Google...
"Three things must come together at the same time to start a fire. The first ingredient is fuel (anything that can burn), the second is oxygen (normal breathing air is ample) and the last is an ignition source (high heat can cause a fire even without a spark or open flame). Traditionally, to stop a fire you need to remove one side of the triangle - the ignition, the fuel or the oxygen. Halon adds a fourth dimension to fire fighting - breaking the chain reaction. It stops the fuel, the ignition and the oxygen from dancing together by chemically reacting with them. Many people believe that Halon displaces the air out of the area it is dispensed in. Wrong! Even for the toughest hazards, less than an 8% concentration by volume is required. There is still plenty of air to use in the evacuation process. (Emphasis added by me)
I'm not an expert, but urban myths bug me...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
"I traced the cables into a closet. That's blocked off by a workstation/desk. After some convincing, I managed to get them to let me move the desk, and I got into the closet. Where I found a 1987-vintage Mac II, happily munching along as a print server. Hooked into an old phone company-style UPS. Covered in a solid inch of dust and debris. And running without anyone noticing it for at least seven years..."
I don't care what anyone says. They just don't make things like they use to. This story should be right beside the novell server lost behind a wall.
Google was a wiring nightmare, with their older "non-boxed" boxes. I think you even had to move one rack in order to reach another (in one of their cages there). Google has since cleaned up. Then there was Ebay, with the water collecting garbage cans at the end of each row - SC3 cooling was so poor that Ebay had a water cooled system installed (IIRCTICBW).
I can imagine the hari kari that would've ensued had it been an old bindery box that had been running since the dawn of time, and then one day the network backbone guys decide to send ipx the way of the dodo (across the network). Everyone using Mercury Mail would've shit kittens when they couldn't get their email, print, or get to their network shares anymore. Talk about luck.
I've worked tons of places pullin wire...
:)
I worked at mothers cookies in oakland CA for a spell. You think malaysia is dangerous?
I would pull off the 880 by the colliseum,mc arthur blvd? It takes you through a very derilict section of oakland factories.
The entire complex is surrounded by bobwire. If you drive down the street, less than a block, you are in one of the worst neighborhoods in oakland. I had a friend who lived in the neighborhood, he wasn't shittin me either about the danger. I went to his house twice to hang out and that was enough for me.
The server room was cool, about 40degrees all the time so you wore a jacket when you went in there. But pullin wire....Ohhh my god!
I had to run a fiber line from the main building to some office in the back of the bakerery. Now before you get the picture of little mothers running around with cookie sheets and kenmoore ovens you have to understand.... That is not what a huge production cookie plant is.
Imaging a HUGE fricken warehouse with conveyer belts of cookies going everywhere, machinery whiiring and cookies going into boxes and filled with creme and those animal cookies with the dots, all in this HUGE room about the size of a football field.
One end was the mixing end, where they had these mixing machines the size of my garage. Into those would go 50 gallon oil drums of butter, lard. Huge bags of flour being loaded by forklift, ect.
Now at the time, wireless hadn't really made it mainstream. So my mangers convienced mothers fiber would be good since it would provide the best ROI. They were sold and I was sent out to work.
Now the factory was built from steel girders covered with that tin roofing, the stuff that looks like a ruffles potato chip. I got up there to where the top girders are and before my eyes was the most treachorous wire run I ever saw.
Remember what I said about 50 gallon oil drums of lard? Well, when the cookies baked, the lard would vaporize and rise to the ceiling then settle on the steel girders. Over the years a 1/4" layer of lard had deposited 70 feet up in the rafters.
I put my finger in the goop to see how slippery it was.
No friction.
I called the office and told my boss. Later he called one of his friends to subcontract the work out too.
*Disclaimer* Despite the lard, mothers cookies makes a great product, and was an awesome place to work. If you ever get the chance to work there, jump on it, you won't regret it (or the 50cents a bag price for employees
used to work in a bar with a leaky roof. their solution. the entire ceiling (1500 sq. feet worth) was covered in metal signs and chutes and of course, the obligatory car door torn from a police cruiser! every morning there was a flood, killed pool tables, the floor, dart boards, everything. when they finally broke down and decided to fix it, the roofing contractor joked that he could retrofit a nice interior runoff system instead.
sharing is fun
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I think the main point is that when the Halon goes off, it's more than likely to burst your eardrums. At least that's how it worked in a friend's Uni's server room.
:)
I do remember they did a fire test, trying to set off the fire extinguishers with a burning wastebasket. Nothing happened, and they moved the wastebasket closer and closer to the detector. The alarm finally went off when the flames were licking at the damn thing
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
would someone please flush the mail queue?
oh no, the logs are getting backed up!
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
Sorry...um...yeah...meant to write "chicks dig danger".
I think I'm going through Taco Bell withdrawal.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Well, that's sorta the whole point of halon (and thus, why isn't used anymore.)
Having thoroughly studied the subject, umm, no, you're wrong.
Halon is no longer used because:
a)it was poisonous
b)it was ozone depleting
The number one cause of death in server room fires is toxic smoke inhalation from burning plastic/paint/wire insulation/circuit board components/etc. Why? People go in to rescue backup tapes, and are rather quickly incapacitated when they inhale the smallest amount of toxic fumes. Folks- NEVER ENTER A BURNING ROOM WITH A FIRE. PERIOD. Backup tapes are NEVER more important than your life. People think "oh, I'll hold my breath." They don't think about how far it may be, or they may get disoriented in the smoke..and they think "oh, just a little breath, i need to breathe." That gets you coughing. Then you die. Smoke inhalation is actually(I believe) the number one cause of death in ALL fires.
Let's not even start about what opening a door into a hot, mostly sealed room letting in a ton of oxygen does.
My "Blue Book" (computer security, mostly focuses on physical) says to NEVER store backup tapes in the same room as server equipment, PERIOD, because the temptation to rescue them is too great.
CO2 is the agent that suffocates you...in that case, yes, the point is to remove as much oxygen from the room, and yes, you will suffocate very quickly.
FM200 is the most common substitute and is fairly harmless, but works on pushing oxygen from the room, and because it is much heavier than air, requires very good sealing of the room in order to work properly. It is next to useless on fires high up in the room unless the system is very well designed.
An alternative is INTERGEN, which is 100% harmless and is mixed specifically to make your body naturally breathe faster, which is a good thing if smoke isn't really a problem and you just need to keep from suffocating. It also works mostly on rapid temperature change and chemically interfering with combustion(not by removing oxygen), and its weight is much closer to natural air, so it doesn't sink.
Thus, the server room doesn't have to be sealed(Halon and FM200 both require it), but the amount of extinguishing gas is greater and piping is slightly different.
In server rooms of sufficient size that use Halon, CO2, etc... SCBA units are usually recommended if not required. Interrupt switches and delays are very common as well, although both are designed mostly with reducing false discharges, which can cost $5-10k per 1,000 square feet.
More and more commonly, dry-pipe water systems are being used, particularly in 24x7x365 managed buildings. The idea is that if the fire is small, an alarm goes off and a countdown starts. On site staff can take appropriate action(cut power, run in with a fire extinguisher, that sort of thing) or, if it's bad, let the system come on. They're usually zoned triggered and fogging nozzles are used to minimize equipment damage.
Unfortunately, for your average 1,000 sq ft room, you're looking at about $30k to $50k, not including modifications to the room to get it sealed. Dry pipe water is less expensive, but one false alarm could cost you 10 times the system's cost in equipment alone.
Think about it. If the data for "tape#2" was overwriting the data on the only tape...
Hate to ruin an otherwise good joke.
Heh, I've got a 480v story for you. I work in IT for a manufacturing company. We had an apparently faulty air conditioner take out most of the plant, which is no small feat.
First, a little background info. It's an old building. The electrical is a mess of old and new circuits, some three phase 480 delta, some 240/120 single phase, and one major branch circuit even with a high leg. The former maintenence manager was of the mind to "get things working", rather than "get things right". After he was fired, I started helping out a little with the maintenence staff when emergency things came up, since I know a little about electronics, mostly to help them with computerized and digital control systems.
Anyway, from the street, there are 5000 amp fuses, huge suckers, then 1200 amp fuses on a few main branches. From there to a 1200 amp panel breaker for a major section of the plant (the one that the server room is on), along with most of the manufacturing. In that 1200 amp panel there is a 250 amp 3 phase breaker for the air conditioner. This is all 480v delta 3 phase.
Somehow, that air conditioner breaker failed. It vaporized part of the busbar, tripped the 1200 amp panel breaker, and blew the 1200 amp fuse for one of the phases, leave us down a phase. For the benefit of those who do not know, 3 phase motors running with one dropped phase tend to burn up... quickly! Ideally there is an thermal overload circuit to shut them down before that happens, but that doesn't always work. So bang.. the lights are off, and motors start to burn up in various places around the plant.
Once the maintenence staff figures out what is going on, that we are down a phase, they throw the mains on the service entrance panel for that 1200 amp branch. All seems to be good. We just need to replace that 1200 amp fuse and the faulty breaker right?
Heh. Well, it happened that we didn't have any spare 1200 amp fuses. A 1200 amp fuse isn't something you can run down to your hardware store and get. We send an employee to the next town where a store has exactly three of them in stock. $400 each. We tell him to buy all three. He comes back with one.
We replace the fuse, and the maintenence staff replaces the breaker. Upon reenergizing the circuit everything seems fine... until they go to put the protective metal cover back on.
The panel literally explodes. I wasn't in the room at the time thankfully, but the guys that were there say is was bright, loud, and scary. Apparently what happened was pieces of molten busbar had dripped near the bottom breaker in the panel and were close to shorting out the phases. The slight movement caused by putting the cover back on jarred the chunks of metal and shorted out the phases.
So... the 1200 amp panel breaker trips.... but not fast enough to save the upstream 1200 amp fuses near the service entrance. The ones we didn't have spares for. Again. And now it blew all three of them. And the store only had two in stock.
So we get back on the phone. We find another store that has two in stock, so we send an employee out to get all five, from both stores. He gets it right this time.
We finally replace the three fuses, triple check EVERYTHING, and throw all the breakers back on. We had sent all the employees home hours before... they couldn't do anything without power. But we are finally up... nearly 6 hours later.
Needless to say, some things have changed as a result of this, and it really underscored why the former maintenence manager was fired. We called the electrical engineering firm that had most recently surveyed our power systems, and had them run some more short circuit computer simulations, things like that.
Upon reading their report, I learn that our service panel has a ground fault interrupter, but it was turned all the way up to 1500 amps to prevent nusience trips, after it tripped several times due to our really bad "normal" phase imbalances.
Things are definitely improving, and we are much safer now then we ever were. It goes to show how one bad maintenence manager with a reign of terror, and a long tenure, can really screw things up though. I compare it to a programmer that never comments their code, and uses lots of goto statements, only the stakes are much higher.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
As a telecom contractor, I know that wiring closets have the lowest priority in terms of cleanup or the "make-it-look-pretty-the-boss-is-coming" effect. You should see some of the ones from the old Ma Bell days buried deep in the hearts of old office buildings. Yikes!
I used to consult for a client whose server room was in the women's restroom. It had the largest unallocated space of any room in the building, so they stuffed in two low-boy cabinets full of DEC gear right next to the ladies' crapper.
I had to remember to knock before rebooting.
You kids these days just have it too fscking soft, I tell you...
That is all.
I assume that the techs with whom he was speaking had to sort most of the problem out, so a partial "somebody else's problem" field would have been in operation. Doesn't sound too bad to me.
http://www.tfb.net/~nicl/images/?image=EthernetKil ler.jpg
That'll make any machine room the most dangerous.
I thought that was the capivara (not sure of the english spelling) which seems to have been the inspiration for the ROUS in The Princess Bride. I saw a team of firefighters spend a good 90 minutes trying to get one out of an open sewer one day in Brazil. That was one tough giant rat.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Perhaps The Register would like a picture of my desk if they really want to be scared.
God, I just got an image of Timothy sprawled across his desk with a little picture bubble saying, "Scared yet?" Holy crap, what the hell is wrong with me?
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Personally, I am surprised how all it still works.
Less is more !
at my university they were cleaning up a large server room for renovations of the building. while removing the equipment, the crew stumbled on a stray bundle of wires that seemingly led to nowhere. they literally dissappeared into a brick wall. they decided to tear down the wall, and lo and behold there was a unix machine. it had been walled-up while still running. it had an uptime of over 15 years!
Backup tapes are NEVER more important than your life.
But they are important enough to keep in another location so the backups and the primary aren't lost in one "Act of God".
That's not true. Halon 1301 isn't used anymore because it tends to break down into nasty chemicals at 900+ degrees F. Well, at least that's what the Navy told us... The tree huggers say it's cause it's an ozone depleting gas.
Nasty that. Take a look at the component molecules of Halon. Bifluromethane somethin'er other.
Not strictly rats-nest, but it follows from the previous.
This goes back to the sixties, when computers had twitching reels of mag tape and paper tape was king.
The company had a regular overnight run. A control tape was put into the high speed tape reader, all the relevant mag tapes mounted, and the computer got on with its six hour job (about 20 second job by todays standards). Originally there was an operator on duty, but he blatantly had nothing to do, so they decided they could do without him.
But as soon as the operator disappeared, the job started failing at dead of night.
OK, bring back the operator - he can fix the problem and restart the phase which went wrong.
But, as soon as the operator came back, the problem went away. And this was the pattern - if they watched the system, it worked perfectly. But left alone, it invariably failed.
So an engineer decided to sit there and not touch anything. He told the operator to go away, as if he was't there. Which he did, turning the lights out and leaving our hero in the dark - except for the glow of the high-speed tape reader, which shines a strong light through the holes in the punched tape onto photocells. And as he watches, a moth appears and flies through the pool of light, confusing the tape reader and aborting the job.
At the old company that I used to work for. They had no server room yet so the servers just sat in the corner. One day I was working late and the cleaning staff came in. The first thing that they did was to plug the vaccuum cleaner into the UPS that the main server was hooked up to.
It seems they had always been doing that!
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Ouch. Every place I worked at had 14.4KV branched out to several substations fused at 90A, which was good for at least 1.6MW, which branched out into even smaller substations. A failure at one point was rarely noticed elsewhere. Except for the occasional exploding capacitor on the pole outside. Worked great for years with few surprises...
One day I would find out why the 14.4KV fiberglass-epoxy reinforced fuses had mufflers installed on them. Remember that electrical current resists change. If the circuit breaks, the magnetic field surrounding the current collapses and increases the voltage until it goes *somewhere.* Each substation transformer was the magnetic equivalent to a ten foot tall capacitor. Well, if the fuse blows, the the remaining energy in the transformer's magnetic field immediately collapses (the magnetic equivalent of a ten foot tall capacitor) and detonates the fuse filament. This muffler vents this energy harmlessly into the substation as heat without blowing the panels off.
One day, when turning back on the power from vacation, we would find one of these fuses didn't have its muffler installed... And we would learn how things would *seem* to work on two phases.
We would try to install more fuses without the muffler on that phase. The magnetic field was strong enough to pop the fuse out of its holder when the switch was thrown. A wire tie solved the problem while parts were being ordered.
Moral of the story: if you work on high voltage equipment, always leave it as you found it.
The last time a sexy woman wandered into my server room and seduced me she got so far as to unzip my pants, pull down my undies, then ... she ran out screaming something about being on a no cheese diet!
Go figure, some people like head cheese, others take baths.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
How'd they get into my bedroom?
When our old NEC mainframe came out we had a few tiles with 18"x10" holes formerly used for cabling in our raised floor. We still don't have exactly enough tiles, but furniture is arranged better now, a year later, so that these holes are strategically covered by desks, shelves or other equipment.
Better than accidently wheeling your chair over that duct tape patch! I kid you not.
Duh! EBAY it!
I found all sorts of stuff when I was the last customer out of a closed down Verio colo.
About as good as the bugs in the old vacumn tube computers of the old days.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I'm reading about workplace situations in this thread that, if witnessed by an OSHA inspector will get your office shut down, your company fined, and possibly, if you have an Industrial Hygiene or Safety and Health Compliance manager,
someone could leave the building in handcuffs.
It was plenty of fun - I had no responsibility in the matter and it was easy for the tech to slosh traffic around. We were playing 'watch the lights go red' on one wireless network at a time.
Once magma has exited the ground, it's called lava. ;)
Either way its cool (molten rock rocks!).
Actually my college still has them, and they work.
My boss was telling me about how a guy working in the AC system kicked up some dust and it triggered the Halon system. A voice came on to announce they had 15 seconds to get out of the room before it would be deployed. My boss of course hits the button and stops the countdown. But he lets ago, apperantly you have to hold the button until someone can come by and turn off the system. So he and the network admin go diving out of the room just as the halon is released.
There are other labs on campus that have Halon warning labels on them also, and I wouldn't dare try to check if its true.
http://images.e-gerbil.net/ghetto Most of these have not been referenced by any links posted thus far.
I was in a large shared server facility that still used a Halon system, which when released, fills the area suffocating the fire (and any living creatures in the area as well).
Lots of people have been saying that Halon systems kill all living things when they go off.
Thats not true.
I work at a large Cable Company in Oz (not foxtel). The tape library here has a Halon system (as do most tape libraries in media centers...need to for insurance).
Yes, the Halon system sucks most air out of the room...but it is a *most*, not *all*. There is *just* enough air left which allows people to breath...just.
We had it go off once, with a technition inside (I think it was testing or something). The guy survived...but did say it go hard to breath. The general consesus amongst the staff is that you don't wanna be caught in there, but if you are, you are more likely to be knocked out or injured by the tapes flying off the shelves (Cause of the sucking).
Mike
The number one cause of death in server room fires is toxic smoke inhalation...
What's your source for this? I mean... Sure it's probably true, but it's a bit like warning people that bleeding is the number one cause of death in emu attacks.
...
"I'm sorry, but comfortable is the last thing I want in my server room. I want it unbearably cold, and noisy. I want items scattered dangerously around the floor. I want random floor tiles to be missing. I want a very old sandwich of undetermined origin sitting half-eaten in the corner. I want the first thought of any person that enters my server room to be "Dear $DEITY, I must get out of this place IMMEDIATELY!"
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
a friend of mine told a story about the off-site storage facility (datasafe or arcus type of place) in the New Orleans area: when you wanted to recall a canister, you had to hope that the staff there knew that (for example) your tapes were on the floor next to the sewer pipe in the corner.
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3 large red buttons
Shiny, candy-like buttons?
I would send such pictures but then my employer would know of my insidiouse plan to replace the servers with C64s*.
-troy
*http://c64.cc65.org/
Halon works while there is oxygen in the room. That's the point of using Halon, because it is not deadly. It sometimes raises the heart rate a little. But it made leaving a mainframe room much safer.
It got set off once in my mainframe room - the cold expanding gas filled the room with fog, and bits of ceiling tile drifted down (a half-dozen tiles were damaged by the four ceiling dispersion nozzles -- one vanished). The operator who bumped the fire handle with the tape cabinet door had a raised heart rate, due to the explosives which released the gas from the tanks.
Halon works by interfering with the chemistry of the fire. The flames just die, even though oxygen is there. Look it up. Is the Molotov cocktail video online?
I think you're confusing Halon with a carbon dioxide or nitrogen flooding system. That replaces all the air with gas which has no oxygen.
Heard a great one while working at a steel plant.
A few years before I started, they were having some issues with a server apparently rebooting every evening, around 11pm. They checked everything they could think of, and found no problems with they system. After a few weeks, they just couldn't nail down the problem, so one of the guys stayed late to see what happened.
Around 11pm, in walks one of the night cleaners. She reaches down, unplugs the server from the UPS, and plugs in the vacuum sweeper. She cleans the carpet, unplugs the sweeper, plugs back in the server, and leaves.
We suggested that she use a wall outlet, and our server problems were fixed.
Back in '86 I had a top-of-the-line Corona IBM-PC clone (cost me nearly $5,000 then). It had those big full-height floppy drives (two!) and was a very well-built, sturdy unit.
I was working as a computer hardware technician at the time, and I had recently bought a bunch of 256k memory chips. I brought my computer to work to show it off to the guys, and also install the memory where I had a nice anti-static station.
So there I was with all my buddies, showing off my toy. I open the case of my computer, ready to wow them, and at least a pound of dog kibbles spills out of the case. Dog kibbles are strewn all over the computer motherboard. We all kind of stood there for a moment, dumbfounded.
Eventually, I discovered the cause. My house was infested with mice, this I had known. But what I didn't know was that, in the middle of the night, mice will steal dog kibbles from the dog dish, and hide them in little places they can get to later. Apparently, they had been climbing in through the full-height floppy drives and storing the kibbles.
Interestingly, it never seemed to affect the computer!
We used to have halon in our datacenter. On my first day my boss pointed it out and said, "If that ever goes off, hold your breath and RUN out of the room."
If I see ANYONE near the server room with a camera this week, I'll personally remove your jimmies and make them part of megapod 3.
You have been warned.
(we're in the middle of a rebuild, so it's major chaos before restoration to order)
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
Until you can create something that is even remotely similar to a complete Engish sentence, please shut up. In addition, once I had consumed an appropriate amount of crack to understand what you "wrote," I found that it was remarkably unfunny and not witty at all.
Yours truly,
Everyone else on Earth
It is OK to smoke cigarettes in the server room at Philip Morris. They keep ashtrays there for the sysadmins.
FreeSpeech.org
In some of these pictures I am seeing, can you imagine how much fun it would be to have 5 minutes and a pair of wire cutters in one of these rooms???
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Twitter dons helmet over bra cups to shield against the obvious beating to follow post.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Talk about a shitty setup...
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I had the chance to go in and see my highschool's MDF.
I walk in the door, and on the left of me is a huge wall of transformers where all the power for the school comes in.
On the right of me is more transformers, breakers, and the generator control box.
If I look up there is some sort of fan thing with water dripping off of it into a puddle on the floor. Luckily the electrical equipment is an inch or two off the floor.
Straight ahead there is a ladder that goes up to a wood loft with our MDF's equipment. There are a few racks lining the wall and right above one rack is a vent that you can see the sky through. There's a nice sheet of plastic that directs the rain that comes through onto the untreated wood floor of the loft, and eventually onto the floor where it can evaporate. There's also equipment on the racks that our sysadmin doesn't even know what it does or what it's connected to.
Underneath this loft is a makeshift room that contains the POP for the school.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you remodel a building and *then* look for a place to put wiring closets. Fun stuff!
I'm a minister!
Halon is not especially toxic (except to the Ozone layer). It is very difficult to breath but it is just about possible. I agree with you about smoke inhalation though. Server rooms have large quantities of plastics (especially as cable insulation). When burnt thius gives off all kinds of nasty crud, like cyanide and so on.
CO2 is bad when it goes off because the room fogs and you can't see the exit.
As your site says 8% is required to fight a fire, we can assume the average deployment you might not be able to run out if you hang around. Also, you might expect an electrical fire to produce the required temperatures to let those baddies out.
So yes, do leave the room. As others have pointed out, smoke inhalation will get you before any of the above does. So, screw the data, screw your stuff, screw everything and leave. When a fire alarm goes off, calmly exit the building and let trained responers do their job.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Halon Escape looks like fun.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Around here that are stored in a very robust firesafe within the machine room.
Halon is deadly no matter how you look at it. Not only does it replace the oxygen in the room but when it heats up to a certain temp (which I can't remember) it breaks down to it's base components which is out right poisonous, I think one of the gasses is phosgene. The navy still uses Halon in the engine rooms onboard ships but they are being phased out to other systems.
Please excuse my bad spelling and grammer
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I worked at a place were construction was being done on the floor above our server room. There was no bathroom on that floor and the construction workers (I kid you not) "went in the corner"
We had a yellow rain that came down on our desks, omputers and in our server room. One monitor died as a result.
What?! What are you talking about? My boss, she and I...
Err, crap, can't talk about that, I signed an NDA about that sort of stuff.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Unless your Dell has Hep C, you're safe then.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
More...
Fleas, Crabs - pubic lice, scabies. And that is just from the Dell servers. The Compaq servers are the really dirty sluts.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I used to have one of those old motorola modems...
IT nerd in bar: Sometime I post on slashdot without previewing. Hot Chick: Oh wow! Let me call my twin sister so we can get together for a weekend in a cabin.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Is it just me, or does this look more like Audio equipment? Or perhaps something else?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/media/920.jpg
At a smaller ISP, we had to push out the air conditioner and let it drop two stories (because we couldn't pull it back in for some reason) and install a new one -- of course, the ISP did not foot the bill, WE did. This was to keep the servers cool on those 95 degree Michigan summer days.
At a large national ISP, we had ants crawling up the rack, ant traps scattered around the floor, cables at hip, eye, and foot level to get all tangled in -- and worst of all, an air conditioning unit (a 5 ton unit) that decided NOT to work on the hot days -- 115 deg. F ambient, temperature alarms, failing servers, and half-ass customer service staff that shook their heads wondering what to do.
Needless to say, we're now at a world class facility -- raised floors, key/scan access, more AC units than Las Vegas, and where the only thing one has to worry about these days would be, well, bankruptcy.
I claim Halon kills you. The proof is as follows:
Halon kills Ozone, from the given. This means more Halon implies more Ozone killed, which implies less Ozone. However, Ozone in the atmosphere saves you from cancer, and less Ozone leaves you at higher risk to be killed by cancer. In other words, less Ozone kills you. Therefore, from transitivity of implications, Halon kills you. Q.E.D.
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
Sweet, they have a wall/floor mounted server like mine :)
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
A number of years ago a local bank and a local newspaper upgraded from the stoneage and discarded their Burroughs systems.. Being that I was the one that installed the PC's and token ring (yuk) I just HAD to snag the beasts.
:-)
I got all my friends and a parade of pickup trucks and we got all the iron into my home, with much bner to help us.
They took up ALL of the free space in my house. Good thing I was single then! A 2,200sq ft. house jammed with terminals, CPU's and disk drives where you couldn't walk through it all.
The discs were freaking HUGE, as in the size of trash can lids and held a whopping 5 megabytes.
It booted up from a punch tape and that was the code to begin the disc IO routines so it could boot up a little more and do try to do something useful. NO CRT's on this system! Teletype's only! A REAL MAN'S COMPUTER! YEAH!!
Well, we had to be dumb and power it up. The power cord for the CPU alone was 1.5" in diameter!
I powered up the CPU and disc drive (sounded like an airport in there) and the lights dimmed down pretty low. That should have been a warning sign. But Nooooooooooooooo! Crank it up baby, MORE POWER!
We loaded the paper tape and the discs spun up and all my buds flipped on the terminals. POW!!!
Total blackness. It blew my fuses (yes, old screw in type) and set my fuse box on fire. We had to call the FD to come put it out because I didn't have a fire extinguisher at home and you can spray water on an electrical fire.
The FD wrote me up a nice little fine for violating numerous safety codes and the city inspector cited me for operating a business in my home after seeing all the iron.
So much for my own private mainframe. We gutted the units and now I have hundreds of HUGE capacitors for a future project that will involve Tesla coils, water, and flux capacitors..
I don't even dare mention my current computer room. I really do not have any real idea how many computers I have now. I can see 7 running right now on the hub. I have stacks of stuff that would give any normal tech nightmares. After 25+ years at being a tech you tend to accumulate a few spare parts... Arrrrgh!!
do you really think there is just this dangerous gas ready to be released where you work and you have exactly 20 seconds to escape before you die?
If you have a CO2 based total flooding fire suppression system, YES, this is the case! I don't know what the deal is with Halon, but I do know that I work in a NOC in Tokyo, and we have a CO2 based system that has a 30 second warning before the system goes off. After that, the room quickly(60 secs.) fills with CO2 (bringing visibility down to about 0 within a few seconds of discharge) and then poisoning you with CO2.
According to this report from the EPA, high concentration exposure to this type of system will render you unconscious and dead within 30seconds-2 minutes of exposure.
Japan uses gas based fire suppression systems for many different applications. Many of them are Halon based, but some are CO2 based (as is our machine room) This includes multi-level indoor parking garages attached to apartment buildings. I've even seen a halon based system inside this museum!
Gas based systems are used in almost all large scale NOC's. I recently toured a few NOC's in Tokyo, and they all have centrally based Nitrogen gas fire suppression systems. (Which, are not normally dangerous, as they reduce the concentration of oxygen to a level that prevents combustion, but still supports life.)
CO2 is bad when it goes off because the room fogs and you can't see the exit.
AND, because it poisons you and kills you very quickly...
.. and learned one hell of a lot in the process..
Can i translate that to: we made a lot of mistakes.
If losing a phase in a three phase systems burns electical motors - why the heck do people use three phase systems for powering motors?
I am really green on electrical stuff, but isn't it possible to convert three phase into one phase?
Stop the brainwash
This is a direct quote from the EPA's report on Carbon Dioxide Fire Suppression systems:
Because of the widespread use of Halon 1301 in the United States, which is safer than carbon dioxide at fire-fighting concentrations, there may be a lower awareness of the hazards surrounding carbon dioxide use. Experience has shown that a relatively higher margin of safety has been experienced with the use of Halon 1301 compared to carbon dioxide. This high safety margin may add to the lack of awareness of the dangers involved with using carbon dioxide systems.
When you go around and look at all these pictures and see all the mangled shit, Then sit back and think that if you had a couple thousand?(maybe, don't really have any idea how many there are) of these server rooms...voilà! you got yourself a fuckin internet.
Just the fact that you are reading this is a miracle in itself
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." - Dostoevsky
Many people seem to believe this myth that halon removes oxygen from the air, and that it is deadly to humans. It's simply not true.
A fire requires three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. A fire can be stopped in four ways: by removing fuel (e.g. shutting off a gas tap), by removing oxygen (e.g. smothering in CO2 or a fire blanket), by cooling (e.g. with a water hose), or by interrupting the chemical reaction. Halon is an example of this last strategy.
If you wanted to exclude oxygen from the machine room, the most economical and effective approach would probably be to dump CO2 into it. (This is why most office fire extinguishers use CO2 -- it works nicely on small fires and is safe around electrical equipment.) The problem is that in a confined space this would also asphyxiate any humans. (As another example of a confined space containing humans, halon is used on airplanes.)
Halon gas is used in concentrations of about 5%, at which level it is not harmful to humans for short periods. It's roughly as poisonous as other short organic molecules. It could be compared to the stuff you smell when using spraycans or working on a motor vehicle: you shouldn't do it all day or intentionally inhale it, but brief infrequent exposure is not particularly harmful. (Presumably your machine room doesn't catch fire every day...)
This is how it works, as I understand it: halon molecules compete with other chemicals in the room to preferentially absorb energy and free radicals from ignition points. This interrupts the chain reaction, so that energy liberated by burning goes into decomposing halon, rather than into setting more stuff alight. For this reason it can work at low concentrations.
The products produced when halon burns are bad for you, but as another poster pointed out they're no worse than other chemicals produced in a machine room fire.
Production of new halon systems has been tightly restricted because of their potential to damage the ozone layer. That says nothing about whether they're harmful for humans. (Indeed, the high UV flux that causes ozone breakdown in combination with CFCs would be pretty bad for you...)
Some links:
Chemistry of Halon
About Halon
Simple messages:
- Read and understand the MSDS (material safety data sheet) for chemicals in your workplace.
- If an uncontrolable fire breaks out, everybody should leave the room in an orderly fashion, close the door behind you, and call the fire service.
You know, dihydrogen oxide is pretty dangerous in high concentrations too. The length of a chemical name is a poor indication of its toxicitity.
More seriously, although Halon contains halogens (chlorine, fluorine, and bromine), so do most of the plastics used in a server room. You don't want to be around when they're burning.
Incidentally, this is why there are separate "plenum rated" ethernet cables: they're made from chemicals that won't break down into anything *too* nasty when they burn, and therefore they can legally be used in air vents and similar spaces.
tacos equipment
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
Hell you must have a ball at intersections, all them traffic lights.......mmmmmmm
Actually, FM200 causes an endothermic reaction that drops surfaces below the ignition point, and it's harmless to humans... here is a video of FM200 going off in an occupied space.
I used to work for a company who did IT contract work for a British Steel.
We had one vax system who job was something to do with stock tracking and dispatch that seemed to be having intermittent reboots. Every few days at around 5pm it would go off for 5 minutes and then restart as if nothing had happened. We spent days looking for bugs that might cause this to happen until eventually my boss decided to sit and watch it. So 5pm and the cleaner comes in and asks if its OK for her to clean up around my boss who said "fine". Moments later the server powers off and the screen goes blank, just as the cleaner starts her vacuum. Turned out she'd been seen the socket marked "Vax" and assumed that was where she was supposed to plug in her vacuum cleaner, unplugging our Vax when she started and plugging it back in when she finished.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I used to work at a glass company in the greater Seattle area (name withheld to protect them). Their server room had wiring on the walls inside a half baked closet (yes it was hot, too). Now, rather than just running Cat-5A or Cat-5B they had both. The wiring in the snakes was Cat-5B and the rest was Cat-5A. Lots of fun when you have to repunch or patch on the fly.
But that is never enough is it? They also ran serial connections through the snakes without using any serial concentrators along the way. All of the wiring was thrown together as was needed with documentation a distant dream rather than a reality.
Knowing that this system was in serious trouble (RAID level 0 with no way to reinstall without calling an out of state vendor to bail us out), and knowing that a migration was looming about a year away (from AIX to Windows and I was happy about it), I proceeded to map the darn thing. Took a week of climbing through broken glass (remember where this was), scaling ladders to find runs that went nowhere, and finding that old runs were ran along the outside of the office (well, before they expanded the office that is).
After making a diagram of where everything went and checking everything twice, my manager started ripping out wires before I could get there. Fortunately he didn't pull anything vital and we remained up and running, but I really wanted to deck him for that.
In the server room I pulled out over 500 feet (I measured it as I didn't believe it) of dead wire. We had only three computers in there but major runs ran down into the electrical room below.
Imagine standing on an electrical transformer while installing a new hub and really hoping that you don't slip onto the trash laden floor. That was fun!
I didn't mention that the server room was directly above the electrical room and that above the server room was an ancient air conditioning unit that would dump its condensation on the server did I? Moving the server protected it from the 'rain', buckets prevented the water from pooling, and the cleaning crew would remove the acoustical tiling when they would rot and fall down.
Ask me if I miss the place.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
First I read this:
If you drive down the street, less than a block, you are in one of the worst neighborhoods in oakland.
Then I kind of skipped to this:
Now before you get the picture of [the] little mothers running around with cookie sheets and kenmoore ovens you have to understand....
And I began to wonder what actually goes down in this neighborhood...
I am not a sig.
binary bathroom.... where number 1 really stinks!
Why do a lot of server rooms have raised floors?
Is it for the cables, air-con?
We once had a small sales office which becam a standing joke with our Network providers. The local management decided that the infrastructure supporting their whole operation couldn't possible be placed in a nice little cabinet out of the way (That would take up too much space)... ....so the router and LAN hubs were placed in a cupboard under the sink.
Thank god, the plumbing was fine, we never had any problems!
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
The Head of Security(tm) gave fire safety lessons to every employee. So we went behind the plant down the street and learned how to use a
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Say, does your Setup camouflage your use of IIS or is it the other way round?
I work right next door to two of our larger data centers in Michigan. (These are for an unnamed, VERY large IT provider / slavedriver) Each of the raised floor areas in these data centers are about the size of two football fields. We, too, have the SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus') spaced out as well. I'm not sure what kind of system is used for extinguishing fires in the place, but I don't believe it is water based. None the less, if the alarms started going off in there, you can bet your ass that the first thing I would be looking for is one of the columns with a SCBA mounted on it. I'd rather take a few seconds and grab one of these than try to run to an egress on whatever breath I'm holding.
So there I am, crouching at the back amongst all the cables, helping the main sysadmin to do an audit of the modems when all of a sudden the noise in the room changes, it's gotten quieter as one of the fans has stopped. I look at him, he looks at me. I look down and see that I've kicked out the power to the IPC. "Plug it back in quick" he says with a look of panic on his face. After following his advice we both bolt out of the room, over to my PC and start pointing randomly at the screen pretending we've been there all along, just in time to meet the head developer who comes storming in shouting and screaming about having lost all connection to his baby. Hum, says the sysadmin, lets go and take a look.
We never did find out what caused that reboot...
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
Three phase motors are more efficient. Consider single phase or split phase electrical current, where every cycle has a dead spot while alternating polarity. During this time, the motor has no torque. The motor can be thought of as pulsing the load. Now look at the redundancy provided by three phases and our happy motor has no dropout periods of magnetic excitement. And all phases of rotation have a strong pull. This is good.
Same can be said for three phase generators. The alternator in your car is three phase for this very good reason. If your car alternator was only single, or split phase, your car stereo would pick up some serious electrical noise. The lower parts of the three phase waveform are minimal compared to the zero crossing point, or dead spot, of only one phase.
Also, three phase motors can be reversed. This useful feature can be done by "reversing" two phase wires. The three phase waveform actually has a direction and you can rotate a motor in the opposite direction by swaping two wires.
Converting three phase into one phase is easy. Just only use any two wires and that will be your single phase relative to each other. Or if the three phase is in the Y configuration, pick any phase and the neutral wire. That's how you can get 277 volts off 480 volts. Any two phases will get you 480, while one phase and neutral will get you 277 volts. Touching one wire will give you the nasty shock of 277 volts and possibly burned. Touching two phases will give you the full 480 volts and quite possibly blow your fingertips off. It just depends on how you take your power off the transformer windings.
And if anyone asks why use voltages so high, its because of safety reasons. Higher voltages mean less current, smaller wires, less chance of overheating and fire. The added requirement of metal sheilding is cheap compared to much thicker wire and the possibility of loose connections of unusually bulky high amperage circuits. A rather small, flexible 480 volt wire can take the place of a very heavy, difficult to place 120 volt wire. If we were to supply our building with just 120 volts, rather than 14.4KV, the copper bus bars would be insanely huge, and could explode if thermal tension created loose connections. The 14.4KV allowed us to use small, flexible, underground cables with easy to install connections. Higher voltages require extra safety guards to protect against the environment, but its worth it.
My one-time employer had a room full of servers and test machines.
To keep them running 24/7, the machines were on an internal generator, not the standard power lines.
The air conditioners were on the standard power lines.
One Friday night, the local power company had a blackout.
What was found Monday morning is left as an exercise for the reader.
...was one I inherited when I was working for one of the railway companies in the UK. The network at the time was all 10base2 and there was a multiport repeater on every floor, each connected to the main repeater up in the server room by an individual length of thinwire that ran up a central riser.
Some time before I started work there the cable running down to the seventh floor had failed (probably hungry rodents) and my predecessor had come up with a cunning workaround rather than going to the hassle of laying a proper replacement. He had run a thinwire cable out of the window of the server room, down the outside of the building and in through a window on the seventh floor (I really don't want to know how) which was then run along the ceiling using a whole load of bent paperclips rammed into the polystyrene ceiling tiles, and then into the comms cabinet that housed the repeater.
I was told by one of the staff there that this temporary solution had been in place for months, with only occasional outages. Then again, given the fact that the server room had no racks, shelves or airconditioning and the servers were just piled on top of each other with random assortments of keyboards and monitors dotted around, nothing there surprised me.
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
At the General Motors Design Building in Warren, MI, if you go in many of the the studios and offices the ceilings are brown. Why? Up until sometime in the 80s (I believe, might have been the 70s) employees were allowed to smoke at their desks. To this day the buildings still have a mild lingering smoke smell.
My manager also tells stories of how when she hired into the company (not GM) she could smoke at her desk but she couldn't wear pants.
What a better workplace now...
fer instance. But they all work by keeping O2 away from the fire, which isn't to healthy for the mammals in attendance.
At a big bank here in South Africa, big server room.. ,nice and tidy, however they did a test run of the system with a guy still in there!
They found him in a closet dead! They never replaced the system, just put up motion sensors everywhere, and other systems to make sure nobody is in there when they run a test.
Tested twice yearly, at $80k per test.
Everytime i when't in there... still gives me the creeps!
Finally, the demo was over and we thought we were safe. One Saturday morning at 5AM, after a huge blizzard in NYC, I got a call from building security that there had been a massive flood originating from the residences in an area directly above our data room. Turns out the owner had installed forced-water heaters in the apartments and hadn't insulated the pipes, which had frozen and burst. Although there was about 1/4" accumulation on the floor in the data room, the leak there had missed the nearest cabinet by about five inches. The adjacent NOC room was completely destroyed, but at least it was just monitoring equipment and not production servers and telephones. We somehow got everything ready in time for the market open Monday morning.
By the time we found out the owner planned to build a parking garage in the building's basement, he had already begun demolishing what was left of a restaurant and storage rooms that used to be down there. Keep in mind this is a 100-year old building that had telecom infrastructure for most of the 100 years. When we went down to see what was going on, we found they had demolished suspended ceilings and framed walls that were in some places the only things holding up bundles of 1000-pair copper cables. They had demolished a cinderblock wall to which the 1000-pair splices had been attached. The fiber to Verizon's frame room had only been installed in innerduct, and was lying in the mud and waste. One of our WorldCom 25-pairs (Internet, 800 service, market data, NASDAQ) was running at eye level straight through the middle of the demo area, where forklift drivers had to lift it out of the way each time they passed. The owner had started a war with the building unions, and a couple of suspicious fires had started down there. Oh, and there was loose asbestos in part of the site, so the telcos refused to work until the owner had it abated and environmentally certified.
For the six months it took us to get the owner to clean up the asbestos, for the telcos to install new access away from the demolition, and for us to install steel conduit for our service, we faced the notion that we might be out of business at any point. We did finally get the telecom infrastructure hardened, but the real benefit of this set of circumstances was that they forced us to implemented a real business continuity plan and build an offsite recovery capability in northern Jersey. Although our motivation was due to the landlord's recklessness, the Jersey capability saved our firm during the time we were shut out of our building after 9/11.
Yeah, I worked there a long time. Not!
grab a clue slashdummies
Leave the fire by the door, and then enter the room. Much safer.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Not sure if this counts as datacentre, but we had a brand new generator installed at a place where I worked once. The thing was the size of a shipping container (you know, those huge metal boxes) and contained a Volvo marine diesel engine, a 400 litre tank, 4 batteries (for the starter) intake filters the size of beer barrels and on the roof, a silencer the size of an oil drum with a 8 inch outlet.
:P
The project to get this installed had run for months, with legal difficulties, environmental people, the simple logistics of getting the thing craned over the building as there was no access etc etc. All this meant it had cost a packet - but we had to have a generator to satisfy the banking authorities.
So, the fateful day arrives and it's fueled up, and plumbed into the building power supply. The "dashboard" for the engine is in the building plant room and you can't see the generator from there. We switch the bypass circuit in and fire it up for a test run.
Now, this engine had never been run since it was signed off at the factory, so it contained a lot of protective oil coatings which added to the already substatntial smoke that would normally exit the tailpipe of a 7 litre turbo diesel. After the rev counter hits a steady 1500 rpm , I go round to look at it running.
Yep - there it is chugging away, with smoke like black toothpaste falling out of the exhaust. Within seconds, I couldn't see my own hand, let alone the generator or the building beyond.
After 2 minutes or so, I reckon we've seen enough for now, so I go back to the plant room.... to discover that it has filled the building with toxic fumes, the fire alarm has gone off, and the entire staff are down the bottom of the car park behind 2 fire engines....
Bit of a design flaw that - turns out the air intake for the building AC is right next to the generator exhaust... (not my doing I hasten to add - it was all perpetrated before my arrival). Needless to say, the generator was never switched out of bypass - we couldn't take the risk that it might actually start - it might keep the computer systems running, but would kill all the users... hmm wait a second..
$100,000 worth of useless metal!
Our server room is small enough that, if the buzzer goes, you hold your breath and run for the door. There's a 'slap switch' which you can hit with your palm and get out.
The absolute first service we set up on anything is ssh. Then we administer *everything* remotely.
dave
I worked for a company called Maximum Charisma Studios last year before they went chapter 7. We had a Cisco 3548XL 1U height switch on a bracketed wood shelf too small for the switch, and all of the patch cables dangling below it because there was no way to secure them.
I asked the boss several times to buy me a $200 aluminum relay rack so that I could mount it down and take care of all of our cables, eliminate the possibility of the thing falling off.
About a month later I was working in the server room trying to move some rack servers around and the damn switch fell off of the shelf, flipped over, and hit me on the head.
The damage to my head was minimal, but it hurt. It could have been serious had the metal corner hit me on the head instead of the flat part.
The damage to the switch was pretty bad. The IEC 320 power port was bent and damaged and ten of the RJ45 ports had their retaining clips ripped out, meaning that plugs would no longer clip in. The network was down for about 30 minutes while I replaced it with another switch that we just happened to have at the time.
Finally after the incident did the boss allow me to buy the relay rack. On the same day that I was about to install the thing we had the "You are all fired!" meeting with the CEO.
The only good part about it all is that I got to keep the Cisco switch. It still has 38 good ports, and I was able to repair the bent chassis and solder in a new IEC 320 plug. A surface mount micro fuse also blew up that controlled the blower in the switch, so I just shorted it with a wire. It works, and a I have a Cisco switch now.
And that is my story.
I am curious about data center safety requirements. I think that it is three feet width between all relay racks and data cabinets, but I would be interested in official documents if anyone knows. Thanks in advance.
I've actually been in a data centre when the halon system was triggered. Everyone got out before the actual release.
um, since when are fleas and crabs perm?
I was stationed in Germany a decade or so ago. We were installing new communications gear (8k RAM on a 12"x24" circuit card -- high-tech!) in the new communications center, and had a row of tiles pulled up to run some conduit. A Major comes in, leading a tour of the new building. Advising the others in the tour that the floor might be loose because of the missing tiles, he jumped across the gap, only to have a couple of the glued-on piers give way, dumping him on his ass.
Luckily he wasn't hurt, except for his ego. *That* was injured later, when he forgot to include the "This is only an exercise" header on a message, informing the Joint Chiefs of Staff that we were under attack by the Rooskies.
That's barbed wire. :-) Bob doesn't have his own standard yet.
http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us/cybereng/shorts/d
Condensed version - a world-class big game hunter has gotten tired of hunting game, because animals do not think. It is much more interesting to him to hunt humans, because they can reason (all right, well most of us can...)
Maybe this is a little more on my mind because of the DC sniper, my wife and I were just talking about this short story a few days ago, bringing back memories of elementary school.
I can't remember where exactly I heard this from. It was either one of the techs at either of Cabletron cert classes I took or it was one of my peer institutions. It seems that during a school break, some construction work was done in a building. On one of the lower floors of the building, not in an area under construction, was a rack with a Cabletron MMAC8. It was a nice rack with a door and everything. Apparently the construction folks were poring concrete on the floor above the rack. There was a small hole in the floor and concrete kept seeping out it. The contractors kept adding more concrete until it stopped seeping out that hole. Unfortunately the hole was directly above the rack. The netadmins came back to campus once the break was over. Eventually one of them noticed that the rack looked a bit odd. The opened the door only to find that the MMAC8 had been encased in concrete. it was still working fine, chugging away. The fiber lines were sticking out the front and everything. Talk about drastic measures in physical security!
Perhaps kangaroos can be considered "rats" under a legal definition... they certainly can cause problems down under. You know, kind of like the legal definition of "narcotics", or "rogue-state" -- it has no scientific or other bearing on reality.
----
Not to be confused with Col.
Damn. This'll undo two moderations, but I can't let this one lie.
do you really think there is just this dangerous gas ready to be released where you work
Son, anywhere I work is a place where there is dangerous gas just waiting to be released, and it usually doesn't have to wait very long. Fortunately, the alarm is loud enough that fatalaties are rare, just the occasional nausea and vomiting. There are NO cases of long-term exposure.
Three-phase power is used in industrial applications because:
1. It is really efficient at turning large electrical motors (think BIG)
2. When you send alternating current through conducting materials (i.e.- wire), you tend to have a mild filtering effect on each phase of current. Three-phase power tends to be of a higher voltage than single phase, also. When you have high voltages, or any voltage for that matter, traveling through a metal conductor, you create a magnetic field. Three-phase transmission lines mitigate that. Not only that, but the higher the voltage, the more efficiently power is transported over long distances. Think of voltage as the wagon, and amperage as the horsepower behind the wagon (insert cart-before-the-horse joke here).
3. You normally need only the single three-phase line in order to power three (count them) separate single-phase requirements (plain old house current).
I bet the chicks dug him, too.
Backup tapes are NEVER more important than your life.
But my porn is on them!
Table-ized A.I.
It's the same in our Datacenter.
The pipes are not charged though.
Basically what happens is as soon as a fire is detected the power is cut in the datacenter then the valves are opened so the water reaches the firezones.
This theoretically keeps water being dumped on live servers.
It would be interesting to see if it ever works.
Who run Barter Town?
I think the problem is usually that people ARENT paid to do this stuff. What usually happens is that management doesn't *want* to have to pay for a proper job, and think that one of the existing staff can just "put it together in his/her extra time". So someone who already has a full-time job to do normally gets reeled into spending some evenings or weekends hacking the stuff together to get it to work. To "save the company some money", and "I'm sure its just as good anyway" etc. Sure it is, at least until the fragile arrangement fails, and the entire company can't work while its being fixed.
Y o u s u c k.
I don't know... based on the warning posters everywhere (that I only noticed afterwards of course), there seemed to be a high risk.
Besides, I'm also sure I signed their liability away in some hidden facility EULA when I signed for a clearance pass.
(For the record, it also wasn't my work, it was a shared hosting facility that rented out cage space).
_______
2B1ASK1
Breathing high concentrations of CO2 can cause distress because the ph of the blood stream drops due to the presence of Carbonic acid which can't be eliminated as CO2 by the lungs.
Actually, the best system is called HiFog. It is used for server rooms, but was originally designed for ships. It is basically a water misting system. The main benefit that it offers over FM200 et al is that it can activate and actually scrub the air free of the smoke.
Usually, a fire starts as smoke, rather than flames. If you can put out the smoke, it can avoid the fire in the whole place.
BTW, most cities require that you have a dry pipe backup system, in case the "fancy" things don't work. The goal of anything else is really just to try and prevent equipment damage...
Did work for a company that had outgrown its server room, so they decided to have a server in each cube that could support it. How do you decide if you can add a server? Well, if the breaker trips, try another cube...