[nycbug-talk] Help!!! (server problems...)

[Mikel King]

Kit Halsted wrote:

> At 7:21 PM -0400 5/26/04, Jesse Callaway wrote:
>
>> On May 24, 2004, at 10:43 AM, Kit Halsted wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks, Jim. Heat was one of the first things to occur to me, & one 
>>> thing I did last time I was there was cleaning the filter on the 
>>> server room AC. (Dropped ambient temp by about 15 degrees! That 
>>> filter was nasty...) Still, it never made sense to me that heat 
>>> problems would happen when the box was close to idle; I would expect 
>>> crashes at peak times rather than at 7:00 AM when the office is 
>>> empty & no one's hitting the web db...
>>>
>>> -Kit
>>>
>>
>> hmm... maybe it wants coffee.
>
>
> No, that I'm sure of! Same client, a year or 2 back, I get a call 
> about a PowerBook not working: turns out it took about half a grande 
> latte in the keyboard. Nice piece of design, that keyboard: it kept 
> the liquid away from the important bits.
>
>> Are the PCI cards sitting tightly in the sockets?
>
>
> Yep.
>
>> Is there someone who doesn't like you who leaves around that time?
>
>
> One of the 1st things I thought of, being a bit on the paranoid side, 
> but no. The office is empty when the machine goes down.
>
>> Someone who touches the power cord at that time, like by walking on it?
>
>
> No one.
>
>> Regarding what Jim suggests, check the BIOS and see if it has a 
>> thermal panic feature.
>
>
> I have to look all through the new BIOS when I can get back there, but 
> that could be it.
>
> Thanks,
> -Kit

Has the building done any electrical changes, or construction recently? 
I few years ago I had a client that their servers would good off line 
sporadically As it turned out the on other side of the wall behind the 
servers; were new high power lines for the elevator systems that the 
building recently installed. The EMI fields generated threw the room 
into a frenzy, caused the UPSes to trippout and well all sorts of 
strange phenomenon. The client thought that it was a poldergiest (sp?).

Another client had a faulty tape drive and whenever the backup launched 
the server would upend.

-- 
Cheers,
Mikel King
Optimized Computer Solutions, INC
39 West Fourteenth Street
Second Floor
New York, NY 10011
http://www.ocsny.com

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