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Stupid Data Center Tricks
jcatcw writes "A university network is brought down when two network cables are plugged into the wrong hub. An employee is injured after an ill-timed entry into a data center. Overheated systems are shut down by a thermostat setting changed from Fahrenheit to Celsius. And, of course, Big Red Buttons. These are just a few of the data center disasters caused by human folly."
Can this really happen easily? I thought for really ugly things to happen, you need to have switches (without working STP, that is).
In the summer of 2000 I worked at Quad/Graphics (printer, at least at that time, of Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and several other big-name publications). I was on a team of interns inventorying the company's computer equipment -- scanning bar coded equipment, and giving bar codes to those odds and ends that managed to slip through the cracks in the previous years. (It's amazing what grew legs and walked from one plant to another 40 miles away without being noticed.)
One of my co-workers got curious about the unlabeled big red button in the server room. Because he lied about hitting it, the servers were down for a day and a half while a team tried to find out what wiring or environmental monitor fault caused the shutdown. That little stunt cost my co-worker his job and cost the company several million dollars in productivity. It slowed or stopped work at three plants in Wisconsin, one in New York, and one in Georgia.
The real pisser was the guilty party lying about it, thereby starting the wild goose chase. If he had been honest, or even claimed it was an accident, the servers would have all been up within the hour, and at most plants little or no productivity would have been lost.
The reality: a 20 year old's shame cost a company millions.
When he arrived, most of the staff had gone home and the skeleton IT staff didn't want to hang around. So, they sent him away on the basis that his work wasn't "scheduled".
Everybody came back on Monday to find totally fried servers.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The old tape machines (six foot tall) used to put out a tremendous amount of heat. Space is at a premium, so in the mainframe room the drives were normally put edge to edge,
with one pushing air in and the other pulling air out. The machines had two 10-12" fans per unit, so stacking two or three units was fine. One site had so many machines side to
side (over 7), the air coming out the last machine regularly set things on FIRE. It was not uncommon for the machine to ignite lint going through the stack, with it coming out the
end as a small explosion like dust in a grain silo explosion. A fire extinguisher was kept on hand, and the wall eventually got a stainless steel panel because it was so common.
My favorite was at a big office building. An electrician was upgrading the fluorescent fixtures in the server room. He dropped a washer into one of the UPSs, where it promptly completed a circuit that was never meant to be. The batteries unloaded and fried the step-down transformer out at the street. The building had a diesel backup generator, which kicked in -- and sucked the fuel tank dry later that day. For the next week there were fuel trucks pulling up a few times a day. Construction of a larger fuel tank began about a week later.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I was employed in a 50 employees publicity company. They have a couple of offices across the country and need to share a filesystem through WAFS. The main repository for the WAFS was running off a USB drive, connected to the server using a wire too short. I pointed the problem multiple times to my IT boss (no IT background what so ever) without success, tried to talk the issue to the owner of the company, without success, and one day tyhe worst happenned. The USB controller of the drive fried and we lost the last day of work. Thw windows server system went AWOL. It took an external consultant 3½ days to rebuild the main server, which was running the AD, WAFS, Exchange and our enterprise database. It costed us an account worth 12 MILLIONS $. The big boss then hired consultants and gave them over a thousand box to get her told the exact same thing I pointed to 3 months earlier when I audited the IT infrastructure. Two months later she comes top me and ask me how much it would cost to have a bullet-proof infrastructure. I told her to invest arounbd 80K in virtualisation solution with scripts to move VM around when workload changes and go with a consolidated storage with live backups and replication. It was too expensive. Another three months pass, she hire some consultants, gave them another thousands $ to get told basically the same thing I told her 3 months earlier... Than is where i quitted.
Tomorrow is another day...