War story for Easter

[Bob Eager]

(not that it has any connection to Easter). Apologies if I've posted this
before.

Our university's ICL 2960 was reasonably reliable - rather more so after
we retired VME/K (the manufacturer-supplied operating system) in favour of
EMAS, an operating system from the University of Edinburgh. The main
points of hardware failure seemed to be fans and power supply units.

When the machine did break down, it caused great disruption to classes,
and these were not easily rescheduled. We were thus under great pressure
to get back in operation as soon as possible. We had invaluable assistance
in this from our site engineers, in particular a lovely man who lived near
me.

One of the most frustrating things was the time it took a spare PSU to
reach us, even with two engineers doing a halfway meet (the trials of
being at the 'wrong' end of the county). So we had a cunning plan; we kept
unofficial on-site spares - unknown to the engineers' manager, who, by
judicious use of smoke and mirrors, was persuaded (unwittingly) to provide
several spare units, at least one of each kind.

The problem was where to store them. They had to be accessible to the
engineers, but could not be kept in the room provided for them, because
their manager might have noticed. Instead, they were stored under the
false floor in the machine room, scattered in various empty spaces.

Of course, there was then the problem of finding the right unit without
lifting half the floor. This was solved by the production of a 'treasure
map', the grid corresponding to the floor tile layout. The map was taped
to the back of a drawer in the engineers' room...well away from management
eyes.

We still found a couple of mislaid PSUs when the machine was
decommissioned.

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On 29 Mar 2024 07:36:41 GMT

Post by Bob Eager
(not that it has any connection to Easter). Apologies if I've posted this
before.
Our university's ICL 2960 was reasonably reliable - rather more so after
we retired VME/K (the manufacturer-supplied operating system) in favour of
EMAS, an operating system from the University of Edinburgh. The main
points of hardware failure seemed to be fans and power supply units.
When the machine did break down, it caused great disruption to classes,
and these were not easily rescheduled. We were thus under great pressure
to get back in operation as soon as possible. We had invaluable assistance
in this from our site engineers, in particular a lovely man who lived near
me.
One of the most frustrating things was the time it took a spare PSU to
reach us, even with two engineers doing a halfway meet (the trials of
being at the 'wrong' end of the county). So we had a cunning plan; we kept
unofficial on-site spares - unknown to the engineers' manager, who, by
judicious use of smoke and mirrors, was persuaded (unwittingly) to provide
several spare units, at least one of each kind.
The problem was where to store them. They had to be accessible to the
engineers, but could not be kept in the room provided for them, because
their manager might have noticed. Instead, they were stored under the
false floor in the machine room, scattered in various empty spaces.
Of course, there was then the problem of finding the right unit without
lifting half the floor. This was solved by the production of a 'treasure
map', the grid corresponding to the floor tile layout. The map was taped
to the back of a drawer in the engineers' room...well away from management
eyes.
We still found a couple of mislaid PSUs when the machine was
decommissioned.

Sounds a bit like an Easter egg hunt!

[D]

Post by Bob Eager
(not that it has any connection to Easter). Apologies if I've posted this
before.
Our university's ICL 2960 was reasonably reliable - rather more so after
we retired VME/K (the manufacturer-supplied operating system) in favour of
EMAS, an operating system from the University of Edinburgh. The main
points of hardware failure seemed to be fans and power supply units.
When the machine did break down, it caused great disruption to classes,
and these were not easily rescheduled. We were thus under great pressure
to get back in operation as soon as possible. We had invaluable assistance
in this from our site engineers, in particular a lovely man who lived near
me.
One of the most frustrating things was the time it took a spare PSU to
reach us, even with two engineers doing a halfway meet (the trials of
being at the 'wrong' end of the county). So we had a cunning plan; we kept
unofficial on-site spares - unknown to the engineers' manager, who, by
judicious use of smoke and mirrors, was persuaded (unwittingly) to provide
several spare units, at least one of each kind.
The problem was where to store them. They had to be accessible to the
engineers, but could not be kept in the room provided for them, because
their manager might have noticed. Instead, they were stored under the
false floor in the machine room, scattered in various empty spaces.
Of course, there was then the problem of finding the right unit without
lifting half the floor. This was solved by the production of a 'treasure
map', the grid corresponding to the floor tile layout. The map was taped
to the back of a drawer in the engineers' room...well away from management
eyes.
We still found a couple of mislaid PSUs when the machine was
decommissioned.

Thank you for sharing!

Let me add an anecdote of my own... (I did not experience this myself, but
the story is fun none the less).

There once upon a time was a company that did backups according to all the
rules in the books, and they used tapes, and they rotated them and stored
them off site according to best practice (almost).

Then one day, they had a problem and had to restore from an off site tape.
They stored their tapes in a box in some kind of self-storage facility. So
said and done... the admin went there, opened the box, got the correct
tape labeled all nicely and went back to the office as a happy camper.

Once there, they discovered that on the tape there was just garbage.

What was wrong?

An investigation showed that apparently the neighbour who had the
self-storage unit wall-to-wall with theirs, was storing strong magnets
there and that was what erased all their backup tapes.

Take care everyone! ;)

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Fri, 29 Mar 2024 12:20:11 +0100

Post by D
There once upon a time was a company that did backups according to all
the rules in the books, and they used tapes, and they rotated them and
stored them off site according to best practice (almost).

Now that brings to mind a site I set up with an Altos Xenix box, a
bunch of terminals, Uniplex and some proprietary software. As part of the
setting up we provided a box of tapes labelled with days of the week
including several Friday tapes and instructed them to change the tape every
day and take the Friday tape offsite to be replaced by the oldest one.
Normal stuff.

Time passes and there's a disaster, the hard disk failed. Not a big
problem, replacement disk gets put in and I'm on site to get them back up
and running. So I put last night's backup tape in and of course it's
corrupt, turns out the disk failed *during* the backup. So I tell them the
bad news, they've lost a day's work and I load the previous day's tape in.
It's *blank*.

Turns out that for the last six months they had never changed the
tape so despite all the careful planning they had no backup. They learned!

[D]

Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
On Fri, 29 Mar 2024 12:20:11 +0100

Post by D
There once upon a time was a company that did backups according to all
the rules in the books, and they used tapes, and they rotated them and
stored them off site according to best practice (almost).

Now that brings to mind a site I set up with an Altos Xenix box, a
bunch of terminals, Uniplex and some proprietary software. As part of the
setting up we provided a box of tapes labelled with days of the week
including several Friday tapes and instructed them to change the tape every
day and take the Friday tape offsite to be replaced by the oldest one.
Normal stuff.
Time passes and there's a disaster, the hard disk failed. Not a big
problem, replacement disk gets put in and I'm on site to get them back up
and running. So I put last night's backup tape in and of course it's
corrupt, turns out the disk failed *during* the backup. So I tell them the
bad news, they've lost a day's work and I load the previous day's tape in.
It's *blank*.
Turns out that for the last six months they had never changed the
tape so despite all the careful planning they had no backup. They learned!

Ouch! Experience can be a cruel but effective teacher!

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by D
An investigation showed that apparently the neighbour who had the
self-storage unit wall-to-wall with theirs, was storing strong magnets
there and that was what erased all their backup tapes.

I’m not sure that strong static magnetic fields on their own are able to
erase tapes. This may be hearsay, but I remember a friend telling me about
a demonstration done with those crane magnets used to pick up cars at
wreckers’ yards, being used to lift a load of magtape reels, after which
they read perfectly.

It takes oscillating fields to erase magnetic media. Something like a
high-current transformer, perhaps?