[CentOS] OT: high static in server room

Wed Jun 15 14:05:44 UTC 2011
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

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.

The bullet-wound analogy is spot-on; I have a motherboard here that will sometimes boot without initializing the keyboard; also,k it will not successfully POST all the RAM (hard loacks during POST) but Memtest86 finds no memory problems.

It operates, but it's not in a critical role.  I'm fairly convinced it was careless handling three years ago that did it.

In my PC 'Fix it' class at a local community college, I stress static issues with my students.  This year, one is a retired highway patrolman, and he got the analogy very quickly.

As to carpeted anti-static tiles, we have them.  Most of our 30,000 square feet of raised floor is carpeted; only some vent tiles are non-carpeted, and they're perforated.  The carpet has conductive fibers interwoven, and static is pretty much a non-issue, until humidity gets below 20%.  Not a problem this time of year, for us.

At least we don't have zinc whisker problems; our tiles are either too old or of the wrong kind of construction to have the whiskers.

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.

The dust off the subfloor (while it *was* sealed when built, it still has collected dust over the years) is a worse problem that off the carpet.