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Finding Lost IT With RFID
CWmike writes "Vendors are increasingly trying to sell users on the idea that they need to stick RFID tags on IT equipment to keep track of it. Users are interested in this technology because they would much rather automate inventory tracking then go server-to-server with a bar code scanner and clipboard. But the new push for RFID tags in data centers also hints at a larger issue: There may be a significant amount of equipment that can't be located. And while out-of-sight, out-of-mind is not always bad, there's a least one nagging problem: 'Ghost server' systems, which may still be drawing power but perform no work and may be difficult to locate. One vendor at the Afcom data center conference suggests IT shops get some 'GPS for your assets.'"
There's the classic "Cask of Amontillado" "Novell server drywalled up in room for years, keeps on ticking". Teh slashdots talked about it back in 2001, but there are plenty of "lost BSD boxen" stories out there, too.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The primary motivation for this technology -- last time I was told about it -- was in hospitals. Expensive equipment is wheeled around a lot, and people sometimes need to know where it is now. An RFID scanner in rooms/doorways and tags on the equipment could tell you this -- so long as the tag was resistant to being bashed against a doorway.
Netware 3.x in particular (before it got "complicated" with version 4) was famous for being ridiculously reliable. Unless you had a disk failures, uptimes in the years was expected. And since it was in a simpler time and generally didn't need to be connected to the internet, you could let things slide when it came to security patches. Again, aside from disk failures, the most common cause of these boxes needing work was "old age", that is, power supplies and their fans clogging up with lint and hair, leading to overheating.