On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 3:13 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Lamar Owen wrote:
On Wednesday, June 15, 2011 09:12:44 AM Brunner, Brian T. wrote:
Damage to circuitry is not all "instant-or-never"; damaged junctions can take their own time (sometimes zero) to degenerate from damaged-but-perfectly-functional to occasional errors to persistent failure.
<snip> > Dust isn't as bad of an issue as you might think, but stains are. And I > do the vacuuming of the data center spaces myself, with a dedicated vac > with HEPA filtration. Takes less than half an hour for the critical > spaces, and gives me a good reason to inspect everything. <snip> Ever heard the old, old m'frame (I think) story, of the guy who needed to do a backup, and the tape failed, and they had to go to an older one. The next few days, he was trying to find out why, and discovered all of the tapes on the bottom row of the tape (reel) rack were bad. Stayed late one day, working on it... and watched as the cleaner came in, and ran the floor cleaner right up to the rack....
And the apocryphal mystery why the servers rebooted at 6:30 every evening. Having said that we once had a cleaner unplug a router to plug a kettle in, but that's rather more likely because it was tucked away in a corner than unplugging a whole computer. Was back in '85 as well so your average cleaner had no clue what a computer was.
On the other hand I managed to prank the cleaner in our computer lab. We had 20 or so computers with touch screens and speech synth back in '85 when they were both magic. I left a program running one every one of them so say 'thank you' when she finished cleaning the screen. We had the cleanest screens ever.