Data Centre meets Vacuum Cleaner Post: 303014244

Sponsored Content

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

View Public Profile for Don Cragun

Find all posts by Don Cragun

6 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. News, Links, Events and Announcements

The HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre

If you're looking for an easy source of free software for HP-UX, look no further. A consortium of major universities and HP user groups have banded together and operate what is simply the finest free software site in existence. The world's best HP-UX software engineers have ported each package...

2. Solaris

Sun Management Centre

Hi Guys, Does anyone ever use Sun MC before? If yes, can u share with me how to do the installation. Thanks

3. Shell Programming and Scripting

Cleaner method for this if-then statement?

I have a script that runs once per month. It performs a certain task ONLY if the month is January, April, July, or October. MONTH=`date +%m` if || || || ; then do something else do a different thing fi Is there a neater way of doing it than my four separate "or" comparisons? That...

4. Shell Programming and Scripting

Cleaner way to use shell variable in awk /X/,/Y/ syntax?

$ cat data Do NOT print me START_MARKER Print Me END_MARKER Do NOT print me $ cat awk.sh start=START_MARKER end=END_MARKER echo; echo Is this ugly syntax the only way? awk '/'"$start"'/,/'"$end"'/ { print }' data echo; echo Is there some modification of this that would work? awk...

5. Shell Programming and Scripting

A cleaner way to rearrange column

Hello, I have some tab delimited text data, index name chg_p chg_m 1 name,1 1 0 2 name,2 1 1 3 name,3 1 0 4 name,4 1 0 5 name,5 1 1 I need to duplicate the "index" column, call it "id" and insert it after the...

6. Shell Programming and Scripting

Maybe a cleaner way to generate a file?

greetings, to be clear, i have a solution but i'm wondering if anyone has a cleaner way to accomplish the following: the variable: LSB_MCPU_HOSTS='t70c7n120 16 t70c7n121 16 t70c7n122 16 t70c7n123 16 t70c7n124 16 t70c7n125 16 t70c7n126 16 t70c7n127 16 t70c7n128 16 t70c7n129 16 t70c7n130 16...

LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE

ppi::token::data5.18

PPI::Token::Data(3)					User Contributed Perl Documentation				       PPI::Token::Data(3)

NAME

       PPI::Token::Data - The actual data in the __DATA__ section of a file

INHERITANCE

	 PPI::Token::Data
	 isa PPI::Token
	     isa PPI::Element

DESCRIPTION

       The "PPI::Token::Data" class is used to represent the actual data inside a file's "__DATA__" section.

       One "PPI::Token::Data" object is used to represent the entire of the data, primarily so that it can provide a convenient handle directly to
       the data.

METHODS

       "PPI::Token::Data" provides one method in addition to those provided by our parent PPI::Token and PPI::Element classes.

   handle
       The "handle" method returns a IO::String handle that allows you to do all the normal handle-y things to the contents of the __DATA__
       section of the file.

       Unlike in perl itself, this means you can also do things like "print" new data onto the end of the __DATA__ section, or modify it with any
       other process that can accept an IO::Handle as input or output.

       Returns an IO::String object.

SUPPORT

       See the support section in the main module.

AUTHOR

       Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2001 - 2011 Adam Kennedy.

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

       The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.

perl v5.18.2							    2011-02-25						       PPI::Token::Data(3)