What Bizarre IT Setups Have You Seen?

MicklePickle wonders: "I was talking to a co-worker the other day about the history of our company, (which shall remain nameless), and he started reminiscing about some of the IT hacks that our company did. Like running 10BaseT down a storm water drain to connect two buildings, using a dripping tap to keep the sewerage U-bend full of water in a computer room, (huh?). And some not so strange ones like running SCSI out to 100m, and running a major financial system on a long forgotten computer in a cupboard. I know that there must be a plethora of IT hacks around. What are some you've seen?"

Comments

the U-Bend

[Helix150]

Just to clarify- the U-Bend is what prevents bathrooms and drains from smelling horrible. Inside the drain, shower water, sink water and toilet waste all mix together. As you can imagine this smells horrible. So, where every toilet, sink, shower, etc connects to the drain system there is a 'u-bend'- a downward dip in the pipe which stays full of water. This prevents air from flowing out of the empty drain.
Most sinks have their u-bend visible under the sink and look like this:
http://twenteenthcentury.com/uologos/ubend_shaded. png
Water flows in the top, and out the back. Because the back is higher than the bottom of the bend, the bottom stays full of water at all times, preventing air from passing.

Problem is, if you leave a drain long enough without water passing through it, the water in the u-bend can evaporate, leaving an empty pipe and allowign the nasty sewer smell to escape. Thus, leave a faucet dripping to keep the U-Bend full!

Re:the U-Bend

[TFoo]

The U-Bend isn't just for smell, it is also a safety issue: sewer gases can be poisonous or even explosive if allowed to collect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_gas

Re:the U-Bend

[Helix150]

running the water at any sort of regular interval will keep the u-bend full. For the U-bend to evaporate would take weeks or months probably. Even the slightest drip should more than counter the evaporation. And it probably seemed like a better solution than a server room which stank up every month for no apparent reason :)

Re:the U-Bend

[TykeClone]

Fill the trap with cooking oil - it will stop the smell and will not evaporate as quickly as water would.

Re:the U-Bend

[ozbird]

Fill the trap with cooking oil - it will stop the smell and will not evaporate as quickly as water would.

Please don't. It's a hassle to remove in the sewage treatment works, and can solidify into a oil/water goo that clogs the pipes.

Instead, simply fit the plug or cover the drain - it keeps the smell out, and reduces evaporation. (If fitting the plug might cause the sink to overflow due to a dripping tap, you probably don't have an evaporation problem.)

Re:the U-Bend

[MadCow42]

Plastic cling-wrap is your friend.... it works wonders on toilets and such, or over sinks where you can't plug the overflow drain as well. It's great for cottages that you seal up for the winter.

Kevin.

Re:the U-Bend

[packeteer]

Vegetable oil will eventually go bad and stink all on its own. Use mineral oil.

Re:the U-Bend

[fbjon]

Or you can just pour some cheap cooking oil into it, which will stay there for a long time. Put a sign on top of the drain as a reminder not to flush it out, if someone goes there.

You should also pour some oil into the toilet when traveling, as it will collect on the surface, preventing water from evaporating.

Re:the U-Bend

[autocracy]

See comments above, but basically large HVAC systems (Lieberts come to mind) having humidifier cycles that pump water into the air, and an air conditioner (or, more simply, heat pump) naturally removes water from the air. That creates circumstances for both incoming water lines and drains.

Re:the U-Bend

[Secrity]

Almost all of the data centers that I have been in have some number of Liebert air handlers in the server room. All of these Liebert air handlers have an evaporator which requires a drain and most of them have a humidifier that requires a water source.

Re:the U-Bend

[redalien]

I wish people would use viri, it anthropomorphises the little buggers delightfully.

Server room heating

[dtfinch]

Company moved into a new, larger building. The server room had a heating vent leading into it, and no A/C. They solved it by clogging the vent with a bag full of shredded paper and cutting a hole in the wall to install a small consumer single-room air conditioner.

Re:Bizarre IT setup seen around the country...

[OECD]

How about the 10 MB email limit? That seemed to show up in the last 5 years or so. Before that I've had success with almost every size attachment I've been sent (and I do printing, so I see some pretty fat files.) When was the meeting held where they decided that?

Honorable Mention

[ShaunC]

I know the poster was looking for funny/interesting anecdotes directly from our community, but for those of you who haven't stumbled across The Daily WTF, hop on over to that site and make it a part of your daily reading. While the focus used to be mostly on programming, it's abstracted itself to the generic IT level in recent months, and you'll see all sorts of bizarre stories there.

The Daily WTF is to IT workers what Jerry Springer is to everyone else. Just when you think you're having a bad day and your life is in the crapper, you can take a few minutes to soak in a situation where somebody else has it much, much worse... :)

Unsynchronized air conditioners

[Animats]

Many computer rooms have packaged units which both heat and cool, and some also both humidify and dehumidify. That's fine if you only have one. If you have more than one, they need to be interlocked so you don't get one cooling while another is heating, or one humidifying while another is dehumidifying. If you get into that situation, everything will seem to be just fine, but your energy bills will be maybe 5x what they should be.

Saw that situation in a server room at Stanford a few years ago.

Re:Seal it up

[Scarletdown]

During some remodeling, the small closet/room it was in was sealed with drywall. It was 4 years before the box required maintenance and someone went about trying to find it and realized what had happened.

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012

Re:Seal it up

[crossmr]

Not the same place, so not the first time it happened. I don't think they had to call in Novell to find it.

Re:Router at the end of a pier

[afidel]

Wonder if that was before Cisco offered extended range products. These days you can get gear from Cisco that will survive in the Sahara in a NEMA3(sealed) outdoor enclosure.

Re:collision detection?

[Tore S B]

Uhm, that's on a completely different layer, buddy. The ethernet card driver itself handles the collisions.

Re:The most messed up LAN, evar!

[Tore S B]

The backbone was a five port AUI concentrator... it was too primitive to be called a hub. (AUI was Sun's insane proprietary ethernet connector.)

It doesn't get more primitive than a hub. It was known as a "fanout unit" back then, though, or some other names. AUI was not Sun proprietary, it was an open standard, and for near a decade was the standard interface between a machine and the physical layer.
a BNC co-ax hub used just to hook up workstations in a star topology... for whatever reason, they decided that ring topology wasn't good enough to string five lightly used workstations together.

Presuming that by "ring" you mean "bus", a hubbed star-wired network is still a bus topology. Possibly they did this for reliability reasons (So that one could not just unplug ones T-joint and bring down the whole BNC loop) but that's just a guess.

Re:Dungeon radio

[clydemaxwell]

Once copying a dying HDD, I had to continually hit 'retry' on the copy operation when it encountered a CRC error. Eventually I just took a heavy wristwatch and placed it on the enter key.

HDD successfully copied!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Thicknet?

[Optic7]

Well, I had one place hire me to sort out their IT... they had a weird proprietary wiring system that worked only with weird proprietary network cards and talked only to a weird proprietary server. I've never seen any of this garbage before or since. All the wires were about 1/2" thick and were run along the hallways, because they'd never heard of the idea that you could have wiring *installed*. And the server was down most of the time, they'd actually poke at it once a day until it went up for an hour or so so they could exchange files, before it crashed again.

Sounds like 10Base5 or "Thicknet", which was the original Ethernet cabling spec.

Humid air is a conductor, not insulator...

[Kadin2048]

The one where ambient humidity serves as an insulator and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge, which is a tremendous risk in a room with that many highly charged moving parts.

I realize this is nitpicking (and the rest of your post was right on) but I think you meant to say "where ambient humidity serves as a conductor and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge..."

Higher humidity makes the air a poorer dielectric, meaning that static charges dissipate before they can build up to significant voltages. With dry air, the air is a better insulator, hence higher-voltage static charges. (This is why the kids' trick where you scuff your feet on the carpet, particularly while wearing rubber-footed one-piece jammies, and then shock the beejesus out of someone, only works in the winter.) Naturally, anything that produces sparks -- particularly my favorite, Van de Graaf generators -- work far better in dry air than wet.