Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed Another working week beckons so once again let’s kick it off with a fresh instalment of Who, me? For those of you new to the column, it's The Register confessional for IT pros who broke things. This week we meet “Hayden”, who confessed that: “Back in 1992 I was sort of a snot nose kid just a few years out of college that knew …
This story doesn't make sense.
If the two cables were intertwined so that both would be disconnected if just one was pulled, how come his own server didn't switch off as well, the first time he tried to disconnect?
And I presume the "blinkenlichts" were just power LEDs? You would surely shut down the server before disconnecting the power?
Pulling on the cable is not the same as pulling the plug.
In the developed world, power plugs are mounted at right-angles to the cable so that pulling the cable gently can identify the plug without disconnecting it; I understand that in other parts of the world the plug is in-line with the cable so that I gentle pull would disconnect it (and I assume this is where your misunderstanding comes from).
In the developed world, power plugs are mounted at right-angles to the cable so that pulling the cable gently can identify the plug without disconnecting it
I understand that your intent is to declare the superiority of the UK power plug over the US power plug, and I might even agree with you, but in the "developed world" data centers use C13-C14 and C19-C20 connectors regardless of the locale and voltage. And those are never mounted at right angles.
but in the "developed world" data centers use C13-C14 and C19-C20 connectors regardless of the locale and voltage. And those are never mounted at right angles.
It might not be common in "developed world data centres", but it's certainly done.
http://cpc.farnell.com/schurter/r47850100/rewireable-iec-socket-90deg/dp/CN02277
http://cpc.farnell.com/schurter/4736-0000/c14-iec-plug-e-r-a-rewireable/dp/CN20025
Similar sockets and plugs can be found for C19/C20 if desired...
That’s true now, but the story was in the 1990s. The servers were on the floor rather than in racks. They had single power cords (no redundant PSU). The plugs would have been BS1363 rather than IEC C14.
I have many unhappy memories of grovelling under the floor to find the right cable to unplug.
Look at their completely modern home wiring system, for example. Outside of China (that well known bastion of safe and secure wiring habits), other first world nations that use Ring Wiring include Uganda and Indonesia. I think we should all learn from this fine example and pay close attention to TheBritishWay. Everybody else on the planet is obviously wrong.
So the developed world is the UK (and former protectorates)? US, Austrailia, Japan, Canada, most of Europe are all 3rd world countries?
By now, the US has indeed sunk to that level. Dictator in charge, poor people being exploited to the max, no attention to Human Rights and absoluetly no interest in protecting the environment.
The rest still has some resilience, but the question is how long it will take before they realise that being dependent on the US is a Very Bad Thing indeed as it is heading as a country for the same problem as Jared Kushner with 5th Avenue 666: an inability to repay mounting debt..
In Spain, and a lot of Europe, the plug and cable are in a straight line, tug the cable, pull the plug.
Sweet.
We get other things right, maybe?
Friend of mine did accidentally hit a big red mushroom on the wall that shut a whole test and development lab down, we went down the beer hall and never spoke of it again., Well until today.
> "both would be disconnected if just one was pulled"
> Only if both power cables had an identical length of
> cable betwixt the entanglement and the sockets.
> If not, the one with the least slack would pop first.
He was quoting -- and questioning -- the article. It said "both would come out" yet only one did.
Why does the OP deserve all these downvotes?
"the easy approach was just tug on the cable at the point I knew it was my power cable and with another hand wait for a tug at each of the plugs in the outlet.”
“After five or six tugs the plug moved."
This means he tugged the cable to feel which one it was. It didn't disconnect at that point.
" I was like ‘bingo’, and promptly pulled the plug.”
This was when he disconnected the plug that moved slightly. turns out it was the wrong one.
What's so hard to understand?
and I can understand the intertwining, its like the leads at the back of my desk at work.
It could almost be described as being akin to platted hair, I assume as all the cables were originally stored in coils.
In my experience rooms like that have been comms cupboards where often they become uncontrolled due to no engineer ever visiting twice and each one knowing a different "best" way of doing things.
Every time I power down my computer at home for the approximately annual dust vacuuming/ upgrade/ etc, I carefully detangle the moderately large collection of power/ usb/ network/ etc cables behind it. However, despite the fact that nothing goes back there until the next time, they never seem to be as tidy as I left them!
Having spent most of Sunday afternoon doing exactly this, I wholeheartedly agree.
I have a theory -- a theory which is mine -- that the resident house spiders keep themselves amused during the long winter evenings by weaving all the cables together. Let's face it, they're big enough and have enough legs free to do the job.
"we just use a ring label and trunk all the cables. dial up a number or feed a colour and clip clip done. saved my bacon many times with network and power cables."
That's great in a well organised and largish operation. But I suspect in this case, especially all those years ago, the room probably started out with one server and slowly grew, and whoever was in charge at the time knew every box and cable. Then grew some more and the "one guy" moved on or got promoted and by then it was too late to strip it all out and tidy things up as the business could no longer afford the downtime.
One of the few solution is to start a new room, where only new kit goes and maybe older kit which has to be powered down for repairs or whatever so can be safely moved to the "tidy" room. Eventually you end up with the entangled room running the last three or four servers that no one understands, no one appears to use but which will cause a catastrophe if turned off.
"I have a theory -- a theory which is mine -- that the resident house spiders keep themselves amused during the long winter evenings by weaving all the cables together. Let's face it, they're big enough and have enough legs free to do the job",
That's fine, until one of them calls for a human sacrifice.
You don't need house spiders to explain this - or rather, they don't explain it, because wire tangling is an essential property of the universe. If physicists weren't too busy messing around with trivia such as dark matter, string theory and quantum entanglement they'd be getting to the bottom of this. Cable entanglement is far more fundamental to understanding the universe. The real fundamental rule is that cable entanglement (e) = total mass of cable (t) multiplied by the square of the time unobserved (c). i.e. e=mc squared
You don't need house spiders to explain this - or rather, they don't explain it, because wire tangling is an essential property of the universe. If physicists weren't too busy messing around with trivia such as dark matter, string theory and quantum entanglement they'd be getting to the bottom of this. Cable entanglement is far more fundamental to understanding the universe.
I believe that there is in fact an entire branch of mathematics that describes how cables get tangled.
Or I at least remember my A-Level Maths teacher telling me that there is.
The story goes that the guy who started it got fed up of his headphones getting tangled in his pocket, and set out to understand just how it happens, and needed to come up with some totally new methods for handling it.
"If physicists weren't too busy messing around with trivia such as dark matter, string theory and quantum entanglement they'd be getting to the bottom of this."
But string theory and quantum entanglement are precisely why cables get mysteriously entangled. Dark matter probably is involved to, it's usually dark for long periods of time where the cables are.
Maybe he was just plagiarising Anne Elk's theory. But then again, someone much more erudite than me said "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Maybe it was Colton.
Why is there no "tongue in cheek" emoticon when you need one?
This post has been deleted by its author
My pens are more like socks than cables. They're an endangered species that disappear as soon as you leave them anywhere out in the open.
Seriously, forget tracking birds, the RSPB needs to track the mass migration of pens, and figure out why they only ever migrate in one direction. Does the global population of pens fly south for the winter, only to die in the attempt?
Either that, or quantum physicists need to forget about all that string compactification nonsense (haven't they figured out yet that you can just wrap your string into a ball?), and instead concentrate on finding and analysing all the portals to other dimensions that swallow pens, socks and ships, amongst other things.
They could start with my tumble dryer. It's highly suspect. While I'm not actually aware of any ships lost whilst navigating the supernatural abyss of my tumble dryer, it seems to have consumed pretty much everything else that dared to even get close to the event horizon of its interdimensional gateway, or what the manufacturer claims is merely a "door".
Then the bods should settle their unrelenting gaze on my co-workers, who are unquestionably also interdimensional portals to an alternate universe populated entirely by what were formerly my pens, established by the first pen to ever achieve self awareness, and which is now on a crusade to spread its sentience to all pen-kind and liberate them from the Basildon Bonds of literary servitude.
“Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid lifestyle, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life.
And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make fools of themselves in public.”
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
