I was trolling along and I read a couple stories of servers that end up being forgotten. And I thought I’d share.
The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn’t missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn’t find the server. Working with Novell Inc., IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers.
That I’ve seen happen in different ways before. Where a server was used by a Physics class pretty far away. This server just kept running, but the one day it wasn’t working someone had to track down where it was, only to discover that power had been lost to that area. And since it was just a closed up closet people hadn’t worried. And what they thought was just a desk sitting in there was actually the server. And since it just ran it had gotten a build up dust from the neglect. But, given some power it started back up and last I heard was outlasting many other servers they had gotten as possible replacements.
(Yes I know I’m sure part of that story will get corrected)
As for this last story, I’ll just give it too you in brief, and you’ll have to click over to read the full story.
A server used to handle the handing off of credit card processing was getting flaky, and because the IT department was in a current budget freeze a new one couldn’t be bought.
So a work around had to be come up with. So with a little programming skill the admin set a box to ping the server every couple minutes, and when it didn’t respond it would eject its CD drive and hit the reset button on the server. Time goes by and…
