4 ms·
In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's
by GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They traced it back to the shared IBM mainframe, and then to an RPC service, and finally back to the AST PC that had been generating the unique license numbers on the HP Non-Stop and sending them to the IBM.
To prevent such an outage from occurring again, a yellow sticky saying "don't turn off" was attached to the AST.
- dev_tty01 5y agoHmm. Makes a good story, but it sounds a bit apocryphal. What kind of new employee unplugs anything in a server room without significant vetting? Perhaps they hired an idiot, but most new employees wouldn't be that aggressive.
- ct0 5y agomanagement
- pwython 5y agoI'm imagining that sever room to be a dumpster pile in itself, and perhaps they were moving equipment around and forgot to plug the relic back in.
- robbedpeter 5y agoThe new employee working under the direction of the slightly less new manager working to meet the demands of the recently appointed director to "clean out that server room, it looks unprofessional!" Nobody knows anything, and documentation is rare.
- thiht 5y agoI could imagine their manager telling them to unplug it, and that if it was still used they would know it soon enough. That’s a way to build knowledge I guess :)
- analog31 5y agoThe entire World Wide Web was protected by a similar sticky note, for a time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg
- ethbr0 5y agoTo be fair, if the entire World Wide Web had gone offline then, it would have probably affected Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and maybe one person who was reading http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
- hpen 5y agoAny idea why they would use this architecture?
- nisegami 5y ago>In the server room of a state government agency
- hpen 5y agoNice
- GartzenDeHaes 5y agoHave you ever tried to connect an IBM mainframe to an HP Non-Stop (Tandem) mainframe? Some developer figured out a way to do it without spending millions on new mainframe software. The key piece of the kludge was a windows interface to the IBM RPC service that both had a USB dongle and wouldn't run on anything newer than Windows 2000. This was something she had done as a maintenance request and no one else really knew anything about it, until it failed 10 years later. The server people did ask everyone who should know about the PC, so it wasn't just a plug pull.
- mikewarot 5y agoThey tore down Chesterton's fence before they knew why it was there. oops!