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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i286

machid(1)							   User Commands							 machid(1)

NAME

       machid, sun, iAPX286, i286, i386, i486, i860, pdp11, sparc, u3b, u3b2, u3b5, u3b15, vax, u370 - get processor type truth value

SYNOPSIS

       sun

       iAPX286

       i386

       pdp11

       sparc

       u3b

       u3b2

       u3b5

       u3b15

       vax

       u370

DESCRIPTION

       The following commands will return a true value (exit code of 0) if you are using an instruction set that the command name indicates.

       sun	  True if you are on a Sun system.

       iAPX286	  True if you are on a computer using an iAPX286 processor.

       i386	  True if you are on a computer using an iAPX386 processor.

       pdp11	   True if you are on a PDP-11/45tm or PDP-11/70tm.

       sparc	  True if you are on a computer using a SPARC-family processor.

       u3b	  True if you are on a 3B20 computer.

       u3b2	  True if you are on a 3B2 computer.

       u3b5	  True if you are on a 3B5 computer.

       u3b15	  True if you are on a 3B15 computer.

       vax	  True if you are on a VAX-11/750tm or VAX-11/780tm.

       u370	  True if you are on an IBM(R) System/370tm computer.

       The  commands  that  do	not  apply will return a false (non-zero) value. These commands are often used within makefiles (see make(1S)) and
       shell scripts (see sh(1)) to increase portability.

ATTRIBUTES

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWcsu			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       make(1S), sh(1), test(1), true(1), uname(1), attributes(5)

NOTES

       The machid family of commands is obsolete. Use uname -p and uname -m instead.

SunOS 5.11							    5 Jul 1990								 machid(1)