Disappearing Servers

From: TeoZ <teoz_at_neo.rr.com>
Date: Sun May 11 12:26:01 2003

That or the hardware the server was running on. Would hate to see the
cobwebs and dust buildup over a few years in a place like that.


----- Original Message -----
From: "VaxCat" <vaxcat_at_retrocomputing.com>
To: <cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2003 12:55 PM
Subject: Disappearing Servers


> 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 - 12:26:01 BST