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 FREEBSD

rup

RUP(1)							    BSD General Commands Manual 						    RUP(1)

NAME

     rup -- remote status display

SYNOPSIS

     rup [host ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The rup utility displays a summary of the current system status of a particular host or all hosts on the local network.  The output shows the
     current time of day, how long the system has been up, and the load averages.  The load average numbers give the number of jobs in the run
     queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

     The rpc.rstatd(8) daemon must be running on the remote host for this command to work.  The rup utility uses an RPC protocol defined in
     <rpcsvc/rstat.x>.

EXAMPLES

     example% rup otherhost
     otherhost	 7:36am  up 6 days, 16:45,  load average: 0.20, 0.23, 0.18
     example%

DIAGNOSTICS

     rup: RPC: Program not registered  The rpc.rstatd(8) daemon has not been started on the remote host.

     rup: RPC: Timed out  A communication error occurred.  Either the network is excessively congested, or the rpc.rstatd(8) daemon has terminated
     on the remote host.

     rup: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Timed out  The remote host is not running the portmapper (see rpcbind(8)), and cannot accommodate any
     RPC-based services.  The host may be down.

SEE ALSO

     rpc.rstatd(8), rpcbind(8)

HISTORY

     The rup command appeared in Sun-OS.

BUGS

     The sorting options are not implemented.

BSD
								   June 7, 1993 							       BSD