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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
For example, statistics show that people who work in server room almost never catch any STDs. I wonder why that is...
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.
Check it out here.
;-)
This is by far to custom case I've ever seen.
Look a bit dangerous though
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!!!!!!!!
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.
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 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).
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
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
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. =)
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 dunno, it sounds like they planned their power consumption PERFECTLY.
"And like that
I got a call from a small publishing company to do some work on their machines (they just bought some new Macs). So I looked around, and found the network cables, and the printer, and...
"Um, where's your print server?"
"We don't have one."
"Yeah, you do, all of your machines are talking to it, it's here somewhere."
"I've been here seven years, and we don't have a server."
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
It is OK to smoke cigarettes in the server room at Philip Morris. They keep ashtrays there for the sysadmins.
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