So I followed this Facebook ad for some poor company trying to gain some business...... "Best Prices" indeed!
So I followed this Facebook ad for some poor company trying to gain some business...... "Best Prices" indeed!
Just snapped this from the Barnes & Noble website as I was preordering Brisingr, the third installment in The Inheritance series (Eragon/Eldest).
I'm curious exactly what format that is in, as well..
@skippy said:
So, be very scared of that dust/grit. Assuming that exhaust hole in the wall was new, then there's a 99% chance that dust is cement dust, which is deadly to the
barringsbearings in the fans on computers.
Indeed, I did ask an employee about that, and she told me that the electrician who installed the unit and put the hole in the wall didn't even bother to cover the equipment or anything before doing so. Didn't even mention they might not want the server in the room during that time.
Instead he just laid a cardboard boxtop over the top of the equipment......
I was helping train a technician some years back, and had him building quite a few desktop PCs for a local school. He got stumped on one particular machine and had to ask me for some help figuring out what was wrong. It wasn't starting up at all, so I broke it back down to check his connections and such. After removing the CPU fan/heatsink, I found that the Socket 478 processor was installed backwards! Naturally, this just isn't going to work.
TRWTF of this story is in regards to said processor. The socket on the mobo had a nice indentation from the incorrectly aligned pins, however after prying it out of that I saw the pins weren't flattened or such despite the heatsink/fan being mounted on top of them. They were bent quite a bit, but not so badly they couldn't be straightened back out. I turned the CPU around and reinstalled it properly, and was surprised it still booted! I was sure that thing would be dead after that.
So...about two weeks ago I get a call from a client of mine, who needs me to move their server out of the office it was currently in and into a small file closet. The office was going to be emptied and used for a new employee, and the small closet was the only other place they had where they could put the server. It used to be located within the same office as an employee, but if you've worked with any Dell PowerEdge servers you may have noticed they can be loud due to all the fans and airflow. It hindered making phone calls, so it gets a room to itself.
Back to topic, I moved the server into the closet as requested. Popped it back on the network and everything was good to go. The closet didn't have much airflow however and they can't keep the door propped open because it blocks the hallway to the restrooms. There was one tiny air conditioning vent in the ceiling tile. I returned onsite the week after it was moved and noticed the room was growing pretty warm. I mentioned that to my client and he had noticed the same and said he was going to have another, larger, vent installed in the ceiling to get more cool air into the room.
Now back to the present, I returned onsite this morning for another random service call. I had to make a change on their server, walked into the closet and was stunned to find this:
Now...I'm not sure how this came about exactly, but instead of installing a new vent up top they decided to drill a hole in the cement block wall leading outside the building and install a portable A/C unit instead. I...was just at a loss for thoughts when I saw it. I did the only thing I could think of at the time: Break out my cellphone and snap a couple photos!
I'm also not sure if it's from the a/c unit or from the electrician moving tiles and working in the ceiling, but EVERYTHING is now covered in a nice layer of dust and grit.
I've been supporting small businesses in my local area for about 10 years now, and I've seen worse setups than this by far. It's just been a while since I've run across anything slightly WTF'ish, so I thought I'd share.
I think I'm going to name the portable a/c unit "R2". Now if only it would blip beep beep whrirrrl at me if I talked to it.........