classiccmp outage

From: William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Date: Sat Jan 10 12:11:31 2004

> No kidding, heck I rarely would allow another engineer unfamiliar with
> one of my customers sites in the cage alone when I worked at Exodus (Now
> Cable & Wireless) a few years back, just too many ways for people to
> screw up and you just can't take ANY chances in a live production
> environment. Man that was a great job, nothing beats the humming of
> hundreds of machines, there cooling fans, the airconditioners whirling
> away, your fingers turning blue after 12 hours in the datacenter,
> occassionally some soul when come walking past and thats like your only
> glimpse of human life for another couple of hours.... ahhhh the good old
> DOT COM days....

I miss those days every so often as well - 3 AM maintenance windows are
something you can actually get used to. Of course it would suck when
something went wrong, and you did not get to leave until everything was
fixed.

One of the neater machine rooms I was in was in North Royalton, Ohio
(ZRN, for the AOL and MCI folks). We has a few rows of our stuff, but
someone wad a fairly big cluster of VAX and Alpha systems. Someone else
had a bunch of RS/6000s, including an SP. To top it off, some oddball
network had a few racks of blinkenlights HP1000s. I never found out who
they were, and I was always tempted by the spare machine sitting on a
workbench.

On the downside, the colo boss at ZNR was a huge dick, and the only
place to eat was some senior citizen hangout diner.

The AOL machine rooms (Reston era) were also a favorite - very serious
machines, they did not fool around. At one point I extimated over 1000
(three zeroes) HP9000 Unix systems - each in its own rack. Everything
else was there as well - Sun, SGIs, IBMs, DECs, Tandems, Stratus, Auspex,
and mounds of our Cisco blue. More fibre than I have ever seen, as
well. After the big crash(es), AOL really clamped down, and no one other
than Steve Case himself could have easy access to anything beyond the
bathroom.

William Donzelli
aw288_at_osfn.org
Received on Sat Jan 10 2004 - 12:11:31 GMT