Kevin Thorpe wrote: > On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 3:13 PM, <m.roth at 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. <snip> Oh, that's ok: a friend of mine (who posts here occasionally) got to blow up at someone(s) in his wife's office, where he comes in as a consultant: someone had plugged a kettle? microwave? (I forget) into the orange box that was labelled "computer equipment only" (Hope you don't mind me telling your story, DaveI.) mark