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This week I got a support call from one customer: "hey, we have a maintenance scheduled for our Dell servers, is it ok if we shut down the two pre-prod servers?
by miahi 11y ago
This week I got a support call from one customer: "hey, we have a maintenance scheduled for our Dell servers, is it ok if we shut down the two pre-prod servers?" "what pre-prod servers?" [all the non-production servers were virtualized about 4 years ago] "well, there are two servers here, with pre-prod labels and running Linux; no applications are running on them"
So I guess 4 years ago somebody migrated the servers to a virtual environment and then just forgot about them. The IPs were migrated to the VMs and these servers were left without an IP address on the network connections, so apart from going to the data room and checking every machine (what they did during the maintenance) there was no way to find them. They were still up and running after 4 years.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoWould an arp-scan work or checking the arp cache of switches for MAC addresses that weren't tied to an IP address? Presumably the servers attempt[ed] to get an IP address at some point (like broadcasting DHCPdiscover or some such) - wouldn't it keep operating if an IP weren't acquired?
- samuel 11y agoNot the arp cache but the Mac adress table, but yes, switches should know where they are.
- iamcreasy 11y agoWhat is server virtualization?
- sciurus 11y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization
- justizin 11y agoAuditing your racks periodically is good for many other reasons. RackTables and similar tools are invaluable!
- alinspired 11y agoThank you for mentioning it, didnt know about the tool!