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

lchage

lchage(8)						      System Manager's Manual							 lchage(8)

NAME

       lchage - Display or change user password policy

SYNOPSIS

       lchage [OPTION]... user

DESCRIPTION

       Displays or allows changing password policy of user.

OPTIONS

       -d, --date=days
	      Set the date of last password change to days after Jan 1 1970.

       -E, --expire=days
	      Set the account expiration date to days after Jan 1 1970.  Set days to -1 to disable account expiration.

       -i, --interactive
	      Ask all questions when connecting to the user database, even if default answers are set up in libuser configuration.

       -I, --inactive=days
	      Disable the account after days after password expires (after the user user is required to change the password).

       -l, --list
	      Only list current user's policy and make no changes.

       -m, --mindays=days
	      Require at least days days between password changes.  Set days to 0 to disable this checking.

       -M, --maxdays=days
	      Require changing the password after days since last password change.  Set days to 99999 to disable this checking.

       -W, --warndays=days
	      Start warning the user days before password expires (before the user is required to change the password).

EXIT STATUS

       The exit status is 0 on success, nonzero on error.

libuser 							    Jan 12 2005 							 lchage(8)