Disappearing Servers

From: VaxCat <vaxcat_at_retrocomputing.com>
Date: Sun May 11 12:00:00 2003

The whole oldest computer on the net thread reminded me of a story
a friend told me.

THE AMAZING VANISHING NOVELL SERVER

He was called in to perform some maintenance on a Novell server.

All the workstations in the office had various partitions of it
mounted and they'd been using it for years.

So Gary, my friend, goes to sit at the console. "Where is it?",
he asks the baffled staff.

"Uh...we don't know."

Unbelieving, he seeks to verify that nobody in the company actually
knows where the server is. Apparently, they'd hired a firm that had
since gone out of business to install and maintain it. Nobody else
ever touched it.

So Gary goes into the telephone room where all the ethernet terminates
and the server would logically be. This is old 10base2 coax. But when
he looks where the coax should terminate, it doesn't. It continues
THROUGH the wall, down in a tight little hole in the corner.

So, he thinks, it must be in the room on the other side. Ah ha! He
goes to the other side...no cable, no server. So, scratching his head,
he goes into the adjacent rooms. Same story.

He goes back in to the telephone room, sees the cable go under the
wall and then it occurs to him. Something about the distances doesn't
add up. He paces off the distance between the wall on the telephone
room side and the wall on the other side and finds that four feet is
missing. Finding no niches in the adjacent rooms he asks why this
might be.

"We did some construction a couple years ago to change around some of
the offices."

The upshot is that the builders had walled the server into a little 4
foot room with no doors and nobody had noticed for TWO YEARS.

Says something about the reliability of Novell servers, I suppose.

Anthony Clifton
Des Moines, Iowa
Received on Sun May 11 2003 - 12:00:00 BST