Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled Admins... War Stories Post: 30703

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled Admins... War Stories Post 30703 by RTM on Friday 25th of October 2002 11:11:54 AM

10-25-2002

Registered User

I've got two great ones done by the same person - an Engineer working in a hospital.

One - problem with A/C units drain pipe clogging and backing up under the data center floor and shorting out data cables due to corrosion.

Solution - put bricks under the cables.

Problem with solution - he never thought that the water could get so high to go beyond the bricks - and never put bricks under the electrical cables. Problem with draining happened again and fortunately was discovered before major electrical problems. Water reached 3/4 of the way up the bricks. Almost topped the electrial outlets (flat outlets on floor maybe 3 inches high) Engineer was not allowed in D-C without escort.

Two: Same engineer brought back in for water problem. He contacted a company that makes Hog socks. They are suppose to be used for containing oil/hydraulic spills in shops. He figured they would soak up water too. He was escorted into the D-C and started placing these 'socks' around the computer electrical outlets. They were near or in front of the A/C blower and the constant blowing caused the material inside the socks to be blow out. It was ground corn husk which looked like fairy dust in the cartoons. The stuff was all over the place and the two escorts and the Engineer didn't notice it. I walked into the D-C and noticed this gold dust everywhere! I went beserk and threw the guy out, started collecting up the hog socks and tossing them out the door. We had to bring in an Enviromental team from Digital to check out our servers. Remember, this is in a hospital where we are suppose to be up 24X7, 365 days a year. We were down 2 days, lost something like 5 hard drives. There is still some dust under the floor if you look under cables. My old boss has a small glass container of the 'fairy dust' sitting on his desk to remind him to never trust the guy. Water problem was addressed by others (water sensor/alarm installed - second drain installed ) The company who makes those hog socks was contacted - they told us these things are not made for computer environments and that the Engineer never mentioned what he was using them for.

RTM

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

socks.fc

SOCKS.FC(5)							File Formats Manual						       SOCKS.FC(5)

NAME

       socks.fc - Frozen configuration file for SOCKS clients

SYNOPSIS

       /etc/socks.fc

DESCRIPTION

       The  frozen  configuration file is produced by make_socksfc and is essentially the memory image of the parsed configuration file. Using the
       frozen configuration file can reduce the start-up delay of the SOCKS client programs since they no longer have to parse the file contents.

       When the SOCKS client starts, it always looks for the frozen configuration file /etc/socks.fc first . If that file is not  found,  it  then
       tries  to  use  the  plain-text	configuration file /etc/socks.conf. If you use frozen configuration, you must remember to run make_socksfc
       every time after you modify the plain-text file or the SOCKS clients will continue to use the frozen file of a previous configuration.

       To find out the contents of a frozen configuration file, use dump_socksfc.

SEE ALSO

       dump_socksfc(8), make_socksfc(8), socks.conf(5), socks_clients(1)

AUTHOR

       Ying-Da Lee, yingda@esd.sgi.com or yingda@best.com

								    May 6, 1996 						       SOCKS.FC(5)