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Server Room Smells Can Be an Early Warning
Barence writes "As embarrassing as it may seem, an eggy smell in a server room needn't mean broaching the delicate subject of hygiene with a colleague. It can actually be a signal that something is about to go wrong with your server setup, as this consultant discovered after days of assuming questionable personal habits were to blame. The culprit? An expiring UPS device, sending out its own unique warning signal."
Sulfur Dioxide. Ventilate, replace or recondition battery. If the egg smell is strong and you quit smelling it, that's olifactory fatigue and lethal levels of the gas exist.
"Can be an early warning?"
"CAN be?"
Like all IT administrators who've actually worked with server hardware, I have a heightened sense of smell, but only specifically for the smell of burning plastic. It's not a mere warning, it's an instant alarm that'll have every IT person in the room sniffing the power supplies.
We IT people, we're like bloodhounds or something. I can smell burned plastic from across the street. I've been set off by welders at a car mechanic a block away. I've been set off by an invisibly tiny bit of cheese someone dropped into a toaster oven once... three floors down from the server room. Had me in a right panic.
IT is all fun and games until the servers literally melt into slag. There's no repair CD for that -- and we all know that the backup tapes, while wonderful for backing up, aren't so good at the actual restoring bit. That's why they're called backup tapes, not restore tapes, see?
From the clasic BOFH :)
"The admin gene," the PFY explains. "The ability to recognise things that users don't. A slight flicker of lighting, a whiff of hot component in the air, a fractional change in the pitch of a cooling fan - all of which the garden variety user misses in the headlong rush to read their email."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/04/bofh_2008_episode_24/