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

test::data

Data(3pm)						User Contributed Perl Documentation						 Data(3pm)

NAME

       Test::Data -- test functions for particular variable types

SYNOPSIS

       use Test::Data qw(Scalar Array Hash Function);

DESCRIPTION

       Test::Data provides utility functions to check properties and values of data and variables.

   Functions
       Plug-in modules define functions for each data type.  See the appropriate module.

   How it works
       The Test::Data module simply imports functions from Test::Data::* modules.  Each module defines a self-contained function, and puts that
       function name into @EXPORT.  Test::Data defines its own import function, but that does not matter to the plug-in modules.

       If you want to write a plug-in module, follow the example of one that already exists.   Name the module Test::Data::Foo, where you replace
       Foo with the right name.  Test::Data should automatically find it.

BUGS

       I'm not a very good Windows Perler, so some things don't work as they should on Windows. I recently got a Windows box so I can test things,
       but if you run into problems, I can use all the patches or advice you care to send.

SEE ALSO

       Test::Data::Scalar, Test::Data::Array, Test::Data::Hash, Test::Data::Function, Test::Builder

SOURCE AVAILABILITY

       This source is in Github:

	       http://github.com/briandfoy/test-data/tree/master

AUTHOR

       brian d foy, "<bdfoy@cpan.org>"

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright (c) 2002-2009 brian d foy.  All rights reserved.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

perl v5.14.2							    2009-02-12								 Data(3pm)