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

[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

[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: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: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: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.