Data Centre meets Vacuum Cleaner Post: 303014244

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The Lounge War Stories Data Centre meets Vacuum Cleaner Post 303014244 by Don Cragun on Thursday 8th of March 2018 04:25:31 AM

03-08-2018

Registered User

Many years ago, while I was working at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on adding POSIX-conformance into SunOS 4.1, I was making changes to the OS and utilities during the day and running complete builds of the system overnight (starting a build just before I left work in the evening). This worked fine for several weeks until one Monday night when the system died at about 8:30pm killing the build-in-progress. There was no core dump, no indication of any hardware problems, and restarting the build when I got to work Tuesday morning completed normally (taking a little over three hours to complete).

The same thing happened the next three days in a row, with the system always dying sometime between 8:20pm and 8:40pm.

I decided to stay at work late Friday evening to see if I could figure out what was causing the crashes. I went to the bathroom at about 7pm so I would be sure that I could be at my computer by 7:15pm and would be able to stay there until I found out why my computer was dying every night. When I got back to my office five minutes later, I found that my computer had been unplugged by a member of the cleaning crew so he could plug in the vacuum cleaner they used to clean the hallway and offices where my office was located. (The way my office was arranged left a power strip close to the hallway while other offices in my area had their power strips in less accessible locations.) I unplugged the sweeper, plugged my computer back in, and waited for the cleaning guy to come back to my office.

I found out that:

the cleaning crew comes in an hour and a half earlier on Friday that they did Monday through Thursday,
they got a new vacuum cleaner on Monday with a cord that wouldn't reach from the plugs in the conference room to the other end of the building, and
unplugging a computer is inconsequential to a janitor if doing so allows him to sweep the carpets at the end of the hallway.

Don Cragun

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

feed2imap-cleaner

feed2imap-cleaner(1)					      General Commands Manual					      feed2imap-cleaner(1)

NAME

       feed2imap-cleaner - Removes old items from IMAP folders

SYNOPSIS

       feed2imap-cleaner [OPTIONS]

DESCRIPTION

       feed2imap-cleaner  deletes  old	items  from  IMAP  folders  specified in the configuration file. The actual query string used to determine
       whether an item is old is : "SEEN NOT FLAGGED BEFORE (3 days ago)". Which means that an item WON'T be deleted if it satisfies  one  of  the
       following conditions :

       o It isn't 3 days old ;

       o It hasn't been read yet ;

       o It is flagged (marked as Important, for example).

       -d, --dry-run
	 Don't remove anything, but show what would be removed if run without this option.

       -f, --config file
	 Use another config file (~/.feed2imaprc is the default).

BUGS

       Deletion criterias should probably be more configurable.

SEE ALSO

       Homepage : http://home.gna.org/feed2imap/

       feed2imaprc(5), feed2imap(1)

AUTHOR

       Copyright (C) 2005 Lucas Nussbaum lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net

       This  program  is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
       the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY	WARRANTY;  without  even  the  implied	warranty  of  MER-
       CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

								   Jul 25, 2005 					      feed2imap-cleaner(1)