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I'll weigh in outside of Twitter. Back when I worked for a large telecom, we decided to move a datacenter from a mid-west, barely staffed site out to one of ou
by mdip 5y ago
I'll weigh in outside of Twitter. Back when I worked for a large telecom, we decided to move a datacenter from a mid-west, barely staffed site out to one of our larger datacenters.
This was a year-long several-hundred rack problem that culminated in a hellish weekend of running cables and powering things up. It was "all hands" in IT and didn't matter that I worked in a capacity that kept me far away from hardware most of the time -- I had past expertise in that area, I was called upon.
Everything went relatively smoothly until about three months later when I received a phone call from our department VP. Apparently a vendor that we billed for Cost of Access[0] had not paid us since we moved DCs; they hadn't received any bills and were happy not informing us of the problem. A long investigation resulted in the discovery that the bills were submitted electronically, by modem (this was 2008, not 1998). The modem phone line was moved and located at the new datacenter, hooked up to a USRobotics 56K modem, which faithfully dialed a number, connected at 1200 baud (?!) and submitted the bill. And we're talking a bill that's big enough to be noticed on quarterly reports.
The offending computer had been brought to my office building in the suite downstairs, and my VP said "You've got some experience with old hardware, can you just take a stab at it?" It wouldn't boot; the CMOS battery was bad. I noticed three numeric values printed on a label affixed to the case and realized, immediately, that these were IDE (ATA) drive geometry settings. So the CMOS battery failed a long time ago, and the engineer solved it by printing the numbers on the front of the case.
And what a PC it was ... an IBM NetVista circa somewhere near the year 2000. Running PC-DOS. It sat in a rack on a shelf surrounded by servers, completely ignored since it was hooked up to UPS, not accessible to the corporate network, and was never patched or rebooted[1]. It was an accidental somewhere-near-3/4-million-dollar-desktop-server.
[0] Cost of access for the kind of telecom that we were was, I think the largest non-staff expense the company had, but it also worked the other way -- we billed people CoA for our network.
[1] The device could not be accessed on our network except from one other host, via one port; it was as air-gapped as it could be and other than the few minutes spent "sending the bill" each month, it didn't carry any data of value.
- jcpham2 5y agoI too have a need to keep old computers online and it's frustrating when the CMOS battery dies and all those super important motherboard settings that make it boot from a hard drive in the first place are lost, over and over on every reboot. Not everyone knows that old computers do not necessarily boot from the hard drive by default.
- dylan604 5y agoWhy not just replace the CMOS battery so you only have to do it once every 4th blue moon vs everytime the thing reboots?
- BizarroLand 5y agoYou can even replace most CMOS batteries on a running machine without causing any issues. The power from the system will keep the BIOS set, and it's a 1 minute job for many servers, slide out the rack, pop the top, thin phillips screwdriver to the CMOS battery to pop the old one out, pop the new one in and button her up. Heck, you can buy 2 CMOS batteries for a buck at the dollar tree. They'll last a year or more with the light usage that would be.
- diroussel 5y agoAssuming the battery is not soldered in.
- dylan604 5y agoIn machines of this age, I don't think anyone would have considered soldering something in like that. That didn't happen until halfway through the 2000s.
- drewzero1 5y agoNot exactly a CMOS chip, but the Dallas Semiconductor DS1287[1] real-time clock chip had a built-in battery that was notorious for failing. [1] https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-10-10-renovating-a-dallas-battery-chip.htm https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-10-10-renovat...
- mdip 5y agoThis model (and every other that I've seen, though, admittedly it's been a while since I've looked at a typical rack mount server) had an easily removed battery.
- usrusr 5y agoNice! Somewhat disappointed that the solution wasn't dialing with the correct area code instead of local (or somehow acquiring the local line matching that number and setting up call forwarding), but recognizing drive geometry settings is even more awesome!
- spurtrenolds 5y ago> by modem (this was 2008, not 1998) I'm mildly amused you consider modems obsolete. Here in the OT world and where systems need to be air gaped [1], modems are absolutely used to provide separated, secured links and non-IP links. They are not going away any time soon. [1] Example, the dial-up time servers provided by the NPL for offline systems https://www.npl.co.uk/getattachment/products-and-services/Timing-services/Internet-Time-from-NPL/its_user_guide.pdf?lang=en-GB https://www.npl.co.uk/getattachment/products-and-services/Ti...
- mdip 5y agoI should have clarified -- the modem was really obsolete for the purposes it was being used. The carrier involved was one that everyone has heard of. All of our other carrier billing was handled using a variety of authenticated links/services to the carrier. And this particular carrier had other, better, ways of doing it, too. For whatever reason, we had never altered that process. It was permanently fixed a few months after we got that host working again.