Problem solved

Problem Solved

This may be an urban legend, but it points to a familiar problem.

Are you worrying about your infrastructure or are you worrying about your business?

How many times....?

Are we going to hear this story? I pretty much put the whole thing together from the intro. "Servers mysteriously rebooting" - hmm, didn't someone ask if the cleaning crew was tinkering with the outlets?

I wonder if there is a website for late night cleaning crew gripes that has tons of stories about, "Everry nite. When I goes to clean out there fancy-shmantzy computor room. I unplug one of them macines that ain't workin and does my job. The next day they tells me that i was messing up there hoity-toyty blinking lites and now i has to use an estension cord from the another room!"

The site might be called "Wipe Gripes" or something clever like that...

UPS

Ever hear of an UPS?????
I know the better ones can cost some money, but come on it's a drop in the bucket to keep stupid stuff like this happening.

What it says on the tin.

Well, he DID say it was an old story. Slow news day?

Heard that one

Seems like I've heard that story a few times before. Another version that I've heard was where the cleaning crew kept flipping the power switch on a power strip by ramming it with the vacuum cleaner. A few weeks of being turned off and on repeatedly and the power supply of that workstation was kaput.

That Reminds Me. Of..

When I showed up to my first IT job when I was in the military. The mainframe computer room had to remain powered up even though there ware no jobs processing. Seems that the air conditioning unit remained powered on 24/7 due to the humidity on the South Pacific island being so high. Finally, we got sheets of plastic, and after shutting down the mainframe (an old Burroughs), tape and disk drives, covered all with the plastic. Within 1/2 hour, it "rained" in the computer room. This happened until we moved into our new facility.

When we moved into our new facility, the EPO button was at the height that when you hit the doors to take the printouts to strip off the carbon sheets, the door bounced back and pushed you into the EPO. Talk about crashed systems! That happened one time. Got a dolly (two-wheel type, that is) to put all the printouts on instead of carrying them. Also used the other door instead of the door next to the EPO.

The Butler Did It!

They're ready to camp out all night if need be, but the minute the cleaning crew (the most likely suspect in stories at least) arrive they go out for coffee rather than waiting to see what the unknown quantity might possibly be doing that could cause a reboot.

I'm surprised that the cleaners were able to access "the same outlet the servers are plugged into", but I would have at least waited around to see what equipment they might have started up just before the servers rebooted.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that a cheapo electrician had tied an outlet in the hallway outside the computer room into the server circuit.

Problem solved

Bogus or not, urban legend or not, back int he 80's my company installed a new IBM 360/168 (cat's meow at the time) and it would crash 2-3 times a day. IBM brought in lots of experienced people, even hooked up a line to their office in NY.

After about 3 weeks of this, they finally found the problem. The chair the operator used had wheels. When he rolled around the floor, it caused static. If he touched the keyboard without discharging, it would crash the system.