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What happends when you turn off AC in a computer room.

newlaunches.com — A tragic tale of stupidity.

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  • Nephyrin, on 10/11/2007, -7/+96/facepalm
    • kingfoot, on 10/11/2007, -37/+7" SQL/DB Error -- [

      1. Error establishing a database connection!Are you sure you have the correct user/password?
      2. Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
      3. Are you sure that the database server is running?

      ]

      SQL/DB Error -- [

      1. Error selecting database iphonela_mt!Are you sure it exists?
      2. Are you sure there is a valid database connection?

      ]


      Warning: mysql_error(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 93

      Warning: mysql_errno(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 94

      SQL/DB Error -- []

      SQL/DB Error -- []

      SQL/DB Error -- []

      Error executing error template."

      i guess overheating can happen pretty quickly when you turn off the AC
      • reyalp, on 10/11/2007, -8/+5I guess overheating is what happens when you use the ezSQL class file and don't use Smarty's caching engine! HAH! HAHAHAAHAAH!

        cos that is an ezSQL error there
        • mdhauke, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1fake. I wouldn't be surprised to get this in a foward in the next couple days
      • dtiziani, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2don't know if you guys saw that, but the databse's name is IPHONEla_mt

        DAMN Iphone!! Struggling even with databases
    • intekra, on 10/11/2007, -5/+115by Alex Papadimoulis

      Not too long ago, there was a small furor in the local media about a major disaster at The State's Technology Services Division. The details were a bit sketchy – mostly because The State was “unable to comment on an ongoing investigation” – but what was reported was that, for two full days, employees of The State were unable to logon to their computers or access email, and that this caused business within The State to grind to a halt.

      As the “investigation” carried on, the media lost interest in the story and moved on to more newsworthy stories like who Paris Hilton was partying with last weekend. Fortunately for us, a certain employee of The State named J.N. works in the Technology Services Division and decided to share what really was behind those fateful days.

      When employees of The State came in to work following a three day weekend, they found their workstations overloaded with "cannot logon" and "Exchange communication" error messages. The Network Services folks had it even worse: the server room was a sweltering 109° Fahrenheit and filled with dead or dying servers.

      At first, everyone had assumed that the Primary A/C, the Secondary A/C, and the Tertiary A/C had all managed to fail at once. But after cycling the power, the A/Cs all fired up and brought the room back to a cool 64°. At the time, the “why” wasn’t so important: the network administrators had to figure out how to bring online the four Exchange Services, six Domain Controllers, a few Sun servers, and the entire State Tax Commission’s server farm. Out of all of the downed servers, those were the only ones that did not come back to life upon a restart.

      They worked day and night to order new equipment, build new servers, and restore everything from back-up. Countless overtime hours and nearly two hundred thousand dollars in equipment costs later, they managed to bring everything back online. When the Exchange servers were finally restored, the following email finally made its way to everyone's inbox, conveniently answering the “why”

      From: ----- -----------
      To: IT Department
      Re: A/C constantly running.

      To whom it may concern,

      I came in today (Monday) to finish up a project I was working
      on before our big meeting with the State ----- Commission tomorrow,
      and I noticed that there were three or four large air conditioners
      running the entire time I was here. Since it's a three day weekend,
      no one is around, why do we need to have the A/C running 24/7?

      With all the power that all those big computers in that room use, I
      doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same
      time. And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C
      for the building in that room?

      I got a keycard from [the facility manager’s] desk and shut off the
      A/C units. I'm sure you guys can deal with it being warm for an hour
      or two when you come in tomorrow morning.

      In the future, let's try to be a little more conscientious of our
      energy usage!

      Thanks,
      -----

      As for the employee who sent it, he decided to take an early retirement.
      • cyberoidx, on 10/11/2007, -4/+20Thanks for the hard work in typing the image out mate, you really have lots of time. Hope the digg up's make your day.
      • DinX, on 10/11/2007, -5/+6WALLOFTEXT!!!
    • smellinator, on 10/11/2007, -5/+18I'm sure everyone thinks this is fake... (you can read it at http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/2007/07/09/im-sure-you-guys-can-deal/ since the linked server seems to be toast.) but to relate a REAL story: I worked at a MAJOR computer vendor (one of the 3 largest in the world), and back in 1987 or so, we had a data center with about $500K (list price) worth of equipment in it. In today's dollars, that'd be about $1M (but probably a pentium-worth of computing power).

      One weekend, the painters (who had been warned that this is VERY expensive equipment) came in, and covered all the computers in plastic so that they wouldn't spill paint on the expensive computers.

      Fortunately, my company made the best hardware available. But we could never brag about our hardware's durability, because we'd have to confess to our stupidity!
      • captmorgan555, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I'm thinking your story is fake. A. I have heard that story before. B. How does one of the MAJOR computers vendors only have $1M worth of computer in a data center?
        • smellinator, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1...Because we were a field sales office of 100 people. It was primarily DEMO equipment and equipment to run the local sales office. Think about a room full of "servers" as they are called today - Back then, it was a room full of mini-computers, 2 or 3 mini-computers, plus several giant 400MB disk drives (the size of a dorm-room-fridge), etc.

          MAJOR computer vendors had data centers all over the country. In our case, we had one in every reasonably-sized sales office (which meant 4 in my state, and, in the surrounding states: 2 states had at least 1, and 3 states had at least 2 data center of similar size or bigger (that I know of).

    • praisethelard, on 06/06/2008, -1/+24Yeah, keep the AC on else you'll get SQL errors. Gotta keep the servers cool.
      • antdude, on 10/11/2007, -15/+1Yep like these:

        QL/DB Error -- [

        1. Error establishing a database connection!Are you sure you have the correct user/password?
        2. Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
        3. Are you sure that the database server is running?

        ]

        SQL/DB Error -- [

        1. Error selecting database iphonela_mt!Are you sure it exists?
        2. Are you sure there is a valid database connection?

        ]


        Warning: mysql_error(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 93

        Warning: mysql_errno(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 94

        SQL/DB Error -- []

        SQL/DB Error -- []

        SQL/DB Error -- []

        Error executing error template.
    • Lavarock, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1Ecomagination™ at its finest.
    • brundlefly76, on 10/11/2007, -1/+26Actually, the moron is the IT manager in charge of the $200k+ data center.
      How does a civilian even get access to his AC equipment? No security policy.
      Why did no one know that the temperature was 100 and that servers had failed until Monday morning?
      Wasnt there thermal and uptime monitoring with a reliable paging system?
      And what is this computer equipment he is using with no onboard thermal shutoff that they just run until they break??

      • sabach, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3You got it, security policy. If they can touch it they WILL ***** it up.
      • captmorgan555, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2You wanna know why? GOVERNEMENT. No one there really cares.
    • captmorgan555, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Wrong reply, digg down.
  • gregm, on 10/11/2007, -8/+205This is why I hate people.
    • antdude, on 10/11/2007, -24/+3Well, you're a person. Hate yourself too?
    • ICSU, on 10/11/2007, -5/+5Because they can't recognize fake news/information when they see it?
    • ummagummas08, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Which ones, the ones who think this is real, or the ones who can't do a simple spell check when they submit a story. I mean I guess it's okay, OCCASIONALLY, but when 9/10 stories have a simple word spelled wrong, it just makes me disgusted with humanity.

      HAPPENS, *****, not happends.
    • jonathanz1980, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1This is why you are a nerd...
      >"This is why I hate people."
  • PATSCRU, on 10/11/2007, -17/+3at least his aim was true....
  • gmoney, on 10/11/2007, -9/+3mmm luvly... **Looks for large bat**...
  • facebook, on 10/11/2007, -6/+97happends?
  • one1plus1one, on 10/11/2007, -14/+83The letter seems too scripted to be real. For example, he explains how he went and got the keycard at the manager's desk in order to gain access to the room. The writer of the letter also goes into too much detail trying to explain why he was coming into the office.

    Wouldn't someone writting a letter like this for real, just say they turned it off, and explain their reason, without going into the details of how they did it, or what they were doing at the office?

    (Ok, I know I know: I'm ruining the fun of this post -- even if it is fiction it still have value in terms of the art of story telling... But still... it seems fake! )
    • evil-doer, on 10/11/2007, -7/+7agreed, completely fake.
      • ChewMyFootOff, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Ever heard of grandstanding? Obviously the guy is showing off to everyone how he is back at work during a holiday.
    • falconX, on 10/11/2007, -0/+21I work for the government, I could see this happening if we allowed people into the server rooms, and the email, that looks like the kind of email one of our favourite users would send if they did something like that. I don't doubt for a moment this is real, hell, people in our building last year were wondering why the server room was getting new AC when the rest of the buildings industrial chillers weren't working right.

      If you have clueless users, they do clueless things, and give complete reasons as to why the do things as well. For all we know, the person who's great idea it was to turn off the a/c and send the email could be a manager, or a consultant, or for that matter an administrative assistant (formerly known as secretary).

      Never ever ever ever doubt the stupidity of a user, it gets you into more trouble than you could ever imagine...

      ***** last captcha was b0rked and had a space in it...
    • cactus476, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9This is just how stupid people communicate.
    • adrianmonk, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2I'm almost positive it's a fake. There's one detail that makes absolutely NO SENSE at all: the detail is that after they restored the ruined Exchange servers from backups, the e-mail from the culprit showed up in their inboxes. This makes no sense for two reasons.

      Reason #1: Most e-mail is delivered relatively quickly. Especially on a weekend when nobody is using the servers. It's unlikely the message would stay queued for long. And the Exchange server would have to fail during the window while the message is in the queue. The culprit would have to wait until the temperature of the server room slowly rose to just the right point, then hit "send".

      Reason #2: The story says that the message arrived in their mailboxes after they had restored the Exchange servers FROM BACKUPS. That means the culprit's e-mail has to have made it onto the backup tapes. That, in turn, means that the Exchange servers had to have been in a state where they couldn't deliver mail messages but COULD complete a backup. That seems hard to believe.

      I guess in theory it's possible some strange interaction of dependencies between servers could cause this (maybe Exchange servers can't deliver messages when domain controllers aren't available but can do backups), but it still seems extremely far-fetched.
      • Sabin, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6Or maybe the message was sent, the server was automatically backed up and then the server room went tropical. It was the weekend so no other users were there to retrieve the message before the servers went down. I work in a corporate environment and this kind of writing is typical of a clueless moron. They are long winded in order to appear to be intelligent but really they aren't fooling anyone.
      • gandhii, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Or perhaps, the email gets sent.. stays on the server because everyone's email program and/or computer is shutdown and can not download the message. Then, server automatically shuts down due to over heating. They boot it up the next week. The email gets sent. It does quite clearly say in the article that only the tax servers were roasted and that all the rest came back up. Seems very logical to me, and I'm surprised that more people here aren't familiar with stupid people who like to show others how smart they are. I should add that most server-only AC units that I have seen tend to have signs warning to not shut them off taped on them, for this very reason. But not all, so .. well.. not hard to believe is what I'm saying.
    • seeyounorth, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Agreed, probably fake. Last I checked the servers that I manage shutdown when they reach a certain temperature. Or so the manuals say...haven't found out first hand. But also the amount of explanation just adds to the fake factor, you almost have to know what you are doing to constitute that kind of explanation.
    • lilrabbit129, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2From the tone of the email it was obvious that the individual was very proud of what he had done. He explained his reasoning to show that:

      1. He was working on the weekend.
      2. He was being "observant" and "thinking outside the box" about the situation.
      3. He was "proactive" by taking things in his own hands.

      Classic Type A personality.
  • DeathJux, on 10/11/2007, -6/+160Holy ***** this is ridiculous. This was lifted from a blog that lifted it from http://www.worsethanfailure.com .

    What do you call double blog spam?
    • nissanskyrice, on 10/11/2007, -0/+127a digg article
    • drgruney, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4A turd by any name...
    • regeya, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1Wait. So what's your definition of a 'blog'? I haven't gotten to see the story in question so I'll assume it's really a blog.

      But Daily WTF? No way.

      So my guess is that your definition is 'a website which contains short stories with a disproportionately large amount of content being in the form of reader comments.'

      By that definition, Slashdot, Digg, and a number of other websites are 'blogs.' So if I link to a Slashdot story, that is, by this definition, blogspam.

      Oh, and here's some anti-blogspam blogspam with a very meta name (with a definition of 'blogspam' that doesn't match the definition of the average diggdrone!) http://www.blogspam.org/
    • eleusis, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1agreed.. I read this a while ago..
    • tomi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx

      Direct link, which was posted 9 days ago.

      [edit] oops, the link was posted below me already.
    • Cputerace, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Tired of blogspam, http://www.youpickthenews.com gets right to the story, no blogspam allowed.
    • panicofficer, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2You can tell it's blogspam pretty quick... no need to read. If the first thing is see is a block of Adsense adverts then it's crap. There are SEVEN specific locations for advertisements on this page... for goodness sake people.
  • seks03, on 10/11/2007, -3/+37fake, where the hell are the admins, there should always be someone watching a big system, I agree, this is fake.

    wheres the details of where this happened?
    • Devrdander, on 10/11/2007, -0/+16Exactly, our server rooms have redundant environmental sensors not to mention the majority of the servers also have temp sensors. the one time the AC was cut for 30 minutes for maintenance on the weekend we received several hundred alerts and had 5 admins onsite in about 15 minutes to check out WTF was going on. How does someone have Tertiary AC systems without any environmental sensors, monitoring, or notices? Honestly if this is real, the manager should have been fired, or the management that denied funding his monitoring proposal should be fired.

      Our CIO has actually had the hard power cut to our server rooms without notice to test us to make sure our redundancy is fully configured and connected. I'm a network engineer and one day he actually asked me if our Core switches were setup for full automated redundancy, when I told him yes, he walked in and cut the power to one of the 6509's all the while he had half a dozen pings running from his laptop.
      • Dax420, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0Your CIO is a retard. The postmortem meeting the next day would be fun to watch.
  • dgblackout, on 10/11/2007, -9/+4http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/2007/07/09/im-sure-you-guys-can-deal/ blogspam.


    totally lifted.
  • Brak710101, on 10/11/2007, -0/+46The web servers go down?

    They must have REALLY melted.
  • ericthegreat, on 10/11/2007, -1/+31Hahaha, what happens??? A website crashes?
  • Terr01, on 10/11/2007, -0/+57Argh, site with many many ads re-using content posted elsewhere? Buried as spam.
    http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx
    • ThreeDee912, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7The ebaumsworld-effect...
      • Terr01, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10Well put.

        IMO the bury option could be improved with a category "Indirect", which lets you--when burying--submit an alternate URL for the "real" site.

        If it's done enough, people are shown something similar to the "Possibly Inaccurate" notification, except it supplies the most popular of the replacement links or a link to a digg submission for the new url if one exists.
  • Dan005, on 10/11/2007, -2/+20The same thing that happened to this server?
  • Murphious, on 10/11/2007, -4/+30You can't make fun of someones 'stupidity' when you can't spell "happens"...
    • STKD, on 10/11/2007, -0/+15This is digg. They can, and will. Sadly.
  • pintomp3, on 10/11/2007, -3/+29you get sql/db error? :)
  • BananaAmbush, on 10/11/2007, -2/+21Original link: http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx
  • spect3r, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5When you turn your AC off - your server goes down...
    http://72.14.253.104/search?hs=sUq&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.newlaunches.com%2Farchives%2Fwhat_happens_when_you_turn_the_ac_off_in_the_server_room.php&btnG=Search
  • webgeek2point0, on 10/11/2007, -8/+70you get this??

    SQL/DB Error -- [
    Error establishing a database connection!
    Are you sure you have the correct user/password?
    Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
    Are you sure that the database server is running?
    ]
    SQL/DB Error -- [
    Error selecting database iphonela_mt!
    Are you sure it exists?
    Are you sure there is a valid database connection?
    ]

    Warning: mysql_error(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 93

    Warning: mysql_errno(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 94

    SQL/DB Error -- []
    SQL/DB Error -- []
    SQL/DB Error -- []
    Error executing error template.
    • trogdoor, on 10/11/2007, -1/+19I thought that was the joke at first, and I thought it was pretty clever. Then I realized it wasn't a joke and it went from clever to ROTFLMAO.
    • scootinger, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Maybe somebody shut off the AC in their server room?
  • aximbigfan, on 10/11/2007, -14/+5stupid ***** tree hugging ***** hippie activist dip *****.
  • Insomniac33, on 10/11/2007, -12/+51Is there any chance that it wasn't a woman who did this?
    • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7A very good chance. A woman wouldn't have been able to work the email system. /sarcasm

      Sexism should be a crime.
    • SoundScape, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9As I read the letter, it came to me in a woman's voice.

      DEFINITELY a woman.
    • RussellDovey, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Bah, you sexist, it could easily have been a man!

      Wait.... "not eco-friendly"... Yes, you can stop looking, it was my mother who did this. "You can read fine with a 30 watt bulb!" "Turn the heater off and put on a jumper!" "Why are there TWO lights on in this room?"
  • rohanch, on 10/11/2007, -11/+33Servers "die" when they get too hot now? As far as I'm aware, they just switch off. If my $200 Pentium 4 can do it, surely $200,000 of servers can.

    The letter also sounds totally fake.
    • Alphateam, on 10/11/2007, -12/+5It can happen. I've seen it first hand. A power supply will burn out something will fail. Why would they build A/C units for them in the first place if they would work when they get hot? Get a clue.
      • Nossie, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4errr to keep them cool? parent has a point.... YES we need A/C to keep the systems cool but when there is no A/C for any reason the failsafes on the boards should shut the systems down after a certain temperature. It's not exactly rocket science, home cpu's wont operate without a fan on header 1 for example.
        • redmaxx, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1I haven't encountered a system that *wouldn't* run without a fan plugged in.
        • rohanch, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@redmaxx
          Most Socket 775 boards will by default throw a BIOS error if a fan isn't plugged into the fan header, actually.
        • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1It is more likely that the hard drives had problems with the heat, not the CPUs.
        • rohanch, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Giga, true, but bearing in mind the CPU always runs a certain level above whatever the ambient is. If the ambient temperature is hot, CPU's (and the power supply) will run hotter, and they're normally the first to detect overheating and shut down, shutting the drives down with it.

          Even if the drives did fail, I highly doubt they'd cost $200,000 to replace. That's more like the total cost of a lot of servers.
      • rohanch, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5But they *don't* work when hot. I just said that, they switch off. And switched off = bad because the system goes down, obviously. But $200,000 worth of equipment needing replacing due to heat damage is ridiculous. That's what I was talking about.

        Decent (and I'm assuming these are decent for $200,000) power supplies have thermal protection too you know, they can also switch off...
    • jmg703, on 10/11/2007, -1/+13The letter maybe fake but servers can die due to heat.
    • solemnraven, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8If your lucky they shut off, IF the cpu is the first thing to get to crit temp,
      UNLESS the temp sensor is broken
      or the Hdd's get too hot too fast causing them to crack,
      ect ect ect
      computers can do unpredictable things under strain
      • rohanch, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Yes, it can happen, but It's so unlikely though. Have you ever seen a CPU with a failed temp. sensor? And to $200,000 of servers?

        Motherboard, CPU and PSU should all have thermal protection, especially if they're as expensive as this claims.

        If there's any truth in this, it's been massively exaggerated.
        • RussellDovey, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Well, my Core 2 Duo reads anywhere from -33 to 233 degrees Celsius at the moment. Methinks there is something amiss.
      • MellerTime, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2You mean you've never seen it happen? We've had all sorts of heat-related "meltdowns". Don't know why the boxes don't shut down due to heat, don't really care... point is that it does happen, and more often than it probably should.
      • Buckiller, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1etc etc etc
    • Ignathius, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2and all those 360 RRoD problems *weren't* caused by overheating. they just up and decided to break themselves for no good reason.

      *****.
      • rohanch, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1*sigh*

        I think people are missing the point of my post.

        First, the 360 is not some expensive server. Second, the failures of the 360 are caused by a *design defect* in the heatsink solution which these servers didn't have. Third, if your 360 overheats normally, you get a red ring of death, but as soon as the temperature goes back to normal, it works again. Same would apply to these servers.
        • Balanced, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Nope. Heat can cause permanent damage to equipment. It's true. I've seen data centers where the heat can rise in degrees/hour if the AC goes down. And if the room is 90, the inside of the machines can be much hotter. Parts warp and even crack.

          Additionally you really don't want drive arrays shut down "for fun"... Our main sysadmins generally assumed that in the event of an unplanned power loss, they'd lose a couple drives. That's why you have RAID...
    • Genma, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6yes in reality I'm guessing worse case in this situation would be to come back to a sauna with a majority of the servers down, but not dead. even then odds are they would still be dealing with a clusterf*ck of data corruption from so many crashes at once. depends on the applications and amount of redundancy.
      • ShiningSquirrel, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0No, worst case you come in to several boxes that are now nothing more then salvage. Been there, done that. I have seen a MB's cracked, components actually fall off the boards, CPUs that looked like they where hit with a hammer, etc. In a perfect world, servers would shut down nicely and then power right back up when cool, but we all know nothing is perfect.
    • hippykiller, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1You paid $200.00 for a P4...!
    • aldenhg, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Heat death happens, especially with AMD procs. Intel chips don't fry themselves quite as often, but it can happen to them, too. There are failsafes for each brand, but those don't always work. Also, the hard drives can overheat (especially under load), not to mention the memory (server memory gets HOT) and the power supply. If you've got a budget to build 100 servers you can't always afford to get the top end everything that will keep itself safe through hell and back.
    • theid0, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I don't know why they would need $200,000 of new equipment, but I have seen individual components fail due to heat. Hard drives are usually the first to go because they have a lot of friction going on and don't usually report temperature back to the software in a standard and timely way before they have faults. Anyway, I've never had a server completely die even in 130+ deg F.
  • mdman, on 10/11/2007, -21/+0Fake.

    http://www.mdcigars.com
    • cookiebearo, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4this is _not_ an advertising venue
      • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1It's not? So I can't say that http://www.google.com is a good search engine?

        Most of the digg articles link to blogs that have advertisements on them, so yeah, it sort of is an advertising venue.
  • beaker1995, on 10/11/2007, -2/+19dugg for the irony of spam and server crashing at 50 diggs.

    ha . . . take that
  • PueSi, on 10/11/2007, -9/+3Holy *****:
    SQL/DB Error -- [

    1. Error establishing a database connection!Are you sure you have the correct user/password?
    2. Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
    3. Are you sure that the database server is running?

    ]

    SQL/DB Error -- [

    1. Error selecting database iphonela_mt!Are you sure it exists?
    2. Are you sure there is a valid database connection?

    That sounds really bad, i'll never turn my AC off again.
  • maz2331, on 10/11/2007, -11/+0"Liberalism always achieves the exact opposite of its stated intent." - Jim Quinn
  • neosublime, on 10/11/2007, -3/+7OH MY GOD. One of my clients came in to their office this past Monday, only to find the AC broke. We live in Arizona, and the temp has been 100°F-120°F the past couple of weeks. The server fans were on double time. We will see if the server is ok this week. :(
  • Alphateam, on 10/11/2007, -5/+3If a place had THREE A/C units they would have some system in place to tell them if it was getting to hot. If they were concerned to have not one but THREE cooling units in case of failure they had a system in place to tell them there was a failure. We do and only have 2 A/C units and around 60 servers.
    Fake story. Funny but fake.
    • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1They didn't fail, they were turned off.
    • falconX, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0They could have 3 units to cope with the heat, we have 3 where I work, un-redundant, we need 3 to keep our server room at 65 so the equipment doesn't overheat. and despite some of the stuff having temperature sensors, sometimes things hit temps close to threshold fast, and if the boxes have the threshold set too high, they start failing fast, and discs are probably the most likely to suffer from the heat failure, S.M.A.R.T. doesn't shut a PC off when the disc gets too hot... It just sends an alert
    • kenwould, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0You obviously live in a state called "System Requirements". There are other states out there and we call those "Minimum Requirements/Reality".
  • keepinithamsta, on 10/11/2007, -2/+40The boss decided to hire his son as a computer technician/network administrator and he did the same exact thing, minus the memo. I was taking the day fixing little issues here and there, mostly user error problems. Every time I pass the server room, I put my hands against the glass to block out light near my eyes to peer in to make sure all the server and router lights are active, and the room was blistering hot. If I didn't have this habit of doing such things, no doubt the company would have taken a six digit hit in order to purchase new servers. He said it was too cold in there and forgot to turn it back on when he left. Same guy decides to turn off windows updates entirely through active directory group policy manager in order to cut down on bandwidth usage in a windows environment.. Lawl 177 updates on the exchange server; and he was wondering why we were getting so much spam. He also removed the anti-virus from the exchange server because not all users had anti-virus installed on their computers. He said he thought there was something wrong with the current install and reinstalling it would force all the windows clients to install anti-virus. I hate him.
    • jmg703, on 10/11/2007, -0/+15your boss should be fired
    • PatoLucas, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Seems somebody needs a new job :)
    • RussellDovey, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Ah, sweet, sweet nepotism. I wish MY dad owned a network farm so I could ruin it with my laziness and still get paid.
      • panicofficer, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Nothing like a family business... I work for one and I'm not a big fan... I'd say more but I don't cherish getting fired.
  • dgath, on 10/11/2007, -6/+8I call BS. The email would have been sent immediately whereas the servers would have slowly started to die. Not the other way around.
    • MadCabbit, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9The e-mail would have been sent immediately, but if Outlook wasn't opened say, if they were logged off or had their PCs off for the weekend, they wouldn't have been able to GET that e-mail until the Exchange server was restored.

      However, I'm still skeptical. Any general story not listing anything specific (like a company or a reference) I'm more likely to call BS on.
      • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Company details would be blanked for privacy reasons, that is sort of how http://worsethanfailure.com works. The good posts wouldn't be posted if the anonymous posters weren't so anonymous as they could get fired.
    • krinn, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10Of course. The email would be sent immediately, but would be stored on the server until the client PC polled for new email. If the user's PC was off, or in sleep mode, then it wouldn't get it before the server went down.
  • STKD, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1They should've bought EFIKA's to use instead. Fools.
  • underdog5004, on 10/11/2007, -12/+1 SQL/DB Error -- [

    1. Error establishing a database connection!Are you sure you have the correct user/password?
    2. Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
    3. Are you sure that the database server is running?

    ]

    SQL/DB Error -- [

    1. Error selecting database iphonela_mt!Are you sure it exists?
    2. Are you sure there is a valid database connection?

    ]


    Warning: mysql_error(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 93

    Warning: mysql_errno(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 94

    SQL/DB Error -- []

    SQL/DB Error -- []

    SQL/DB Error -- []

    Error executing error template.

    wow, and I thought it was going to be some dry article, or a funny picture. This makes way more sense!
  • Kwipper, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10Baseball Bat + Cranium = Sheer Joy!
    • Dhalgren, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1My Name is Mud...
    • J4k3, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Excatly, dude! Man, I would kill this scumbag if he ever did someting stupid like this at my workplace.
  • felchdonkey, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Snopes, anyone?
    • krinn, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Yeah, I'd like to see some verification of this. The article doesn't even mention which state it was.
    • MellerTime, on 10/11/2007, -3/+5Am I the only one that saw those ------ blanks indicating that names had been edited? OFC they aren't saying what state, because it would be a huge embarrassment to everyone involved and they'd probably get slapped with some BS lawsuit by the state government. That's hardly grounds for calling it a fake...
      • subscriber, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Good point, the existence of those blanks are proof it's real. In fact, you can check with ----- to verify the authenticity of the story, and I have it on good authority that more documentation on this can be found at this link --> http://-------
        • RussellDovey, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Wow, a lot of people must be going to that there -----.com, since the damn tubes are clogged. Duggmirror to the rescue?
  • whataboutdave, on 10/11/2007, -3/+13I love the condescending holier-than-thou tone this clown takes:

    "In the future, let's try to be a little more conscientious about our energy usage!"
    • evil-doer, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7because its not real?
      • whataboutdave, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5I can pretend it is for a little longer, can't I?
      • coreyb, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1You have never dealt with tenured, "That's Doctor to you," professors, have you...?
    • captmorgan555, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1If its real, the guy probably went back to his computer thinking he did a good dead and sent the email before the ***** hit the fan.
  • paulexander, on 10/11/2007, -1/+11Wow, in one refresh, the site is dead. It was me....sowwwy
  • jtb4, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Their database error seemed intentional
  • shoonya, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3hmm a "To whom it may concern".....letter., It must have been a project manager, only they are able to do unthinkable acts and claim credit for it.
  • djdigital, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Error executing error template.

    Thats pretty funny.
  • kd1s, on 10/11/2007, -1/+15For the past 8 or 9 months we've had folks in working on our db servers. They're transitioning a major database from one server to another and in the process building a new server, etc.

    Well they were working in the computer room which is kept at 65F. They kept complaining it was too cold so we shut the AC down. Within 30 minutes the room temp shot up to 85F. At that point we turned it back on.

    We probably took three or four months off the lifespan of the servers. Oh well.
  • inkswamp, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5I don't buy this story at all. Any set-up like that is going to have a few ambient temperature monitors that will trigger phone calls or emails to IT or maintenance staff when the server room temperature reaches a certain threshold. That's not expensive or difficult to set up and it's hard to believe nothing like that was in place in this story.
    • rohanch, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2More likely, they'd just have staff there 24 hours to deal with any problems. Even if they didn't have temp. monitoring, they'd realise as soon as servers started going down.
    • Mudb0y, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2You are assuming competent people run the place... Your bad.
    • SoundScape, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4I work in the IT department of our company, and it was a few years before we had temperature monitors in our server room. They fact that this story doesn't mention environmental monitoring units doesn't make it a fake. It's actually quite feasible.
      But leaving the security tag sitting on your desk is pretty in-excusable. Although its still clearly a breach of security to walk up to someone else's desk and snatch their security pass to sneak into the company's server room.
  • exothermic, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4You mean people with mission critical computers and office data centers still don't buy $199 temperature monitors that throw SNMP traps? I think the story is fake, but if it's not, woe-to-them for not having temperature monitoring.
  • andrewcsayer, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1You get page not found?
  • Dhalgren, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1Your database crashes?
    "Warning: mysql_error(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 93

    Warning: mysql_errno(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/iphonela/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/ezsql/ezsql_mysql.php on line 94"
  • recover82, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1"Happends" - "tragic tale of stupidity". Irony is a bitch.
  • ColdDimSum, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6Back in the 80's we used to have this box that sat in the server room and had water sensors under the floor, temperature sensors, noise sensors, and voltage sensors and it would call you and tell you if any of the sensors were in alarm state and it really wasn't that expensive. There is really no excuse not to have something similar or vastly better in todays server rooms.

    You could even remote control it from your phone pad, and dial in and listen to the server room, etc -- and the darn line printers would sometimes set it off at 6am when accounting would print out mountains of useless reports.
  • brianc900, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0They should have bought Room Alert! Monitors the temp in my server closet and sends email alerts when it drops below a certain value.
  • harvinator24, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3This is why it should be legal to punch stupid people in the face.
  • Aupajo, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2This was on worse than failure.
  • joe361, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1This is a perfect example of how dumb government workers are.
    • recockulous, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1As a government worker who can recognize a good troll job a mile away, this comment is a perfect example of how stupid.... you are.

      The original had nothing to do with the government at all... (just in case the anonymous references to "The State" didn't tip you off there), IT WAS ABOUT A PRIVATE COMPANY.

      http://message.snopes.com/showpost.php?p=246051&postcount=32
  • JK1150, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1A server room with no monitoring system? Servers that don't shut off before a meltdown? Unless this was in the 90s, this story sounds a bit far fetched. I've seen this happen before, where server rooms go over 100 because of a failure, but modern day server even racked, wouldn't be so seriously destroyed. Not to mention they didn't seem to have a lot of servers (only 6 domain controllers and 4 exchange servers for an entire state??).
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