I came across a posting today relating to server gaggery. It reminded me and inevitably brought up the oft told tale of the server being turned off when the cleaner unplugs it in order to give the room a good clean.
Now this is usually drags up a fair amount of comment about this being an urban myth. However I can tell you that it isn’t. It happened to me. Although as with most things there is a mitigating factor that makes it slightly more understandable.
The tale begins nine years ago when I took the job of transforming an outdated IT shop into something a bit more modern. At the time of my arrival their back end systems consisted of three Novel 3 “servers”and 1 NT box. I use the quote marks because in reality all of these units were glorified PCs. The NT box had been installed by a consultancy firm at great expense and needless to say didn’t work and broke just about every rule in the book (but don’t get me started down that track).
After settling in I decided that NT was the future and that to do the job properly we needed to start using proper servers. One was duly procured and things started to get on track. Now at this point a matter of geography. The existing servers all resided in a room that doubled as an office. Not what you’d call data centre! The new server though didn’t fit as it was much larger as it had fancy things such as more than one hard drive! Next door to the original room was a nearly empty space that was ideal for a server room,especially for what I had in mind going forward with racks. So in it went.
All was well with the world,things improved. At this time I lived close by and used to come in quite early. I noticed a couple of times that the new server was at the NT login screen rather than the locked screen. This was odd but there were no errors in the log,clearly the machine had restarted but with no error. Then one day I wasn’t in and the phone went mad. Clearly we had a problem. So we started diagnostics. We came in at the weekend and tried everything we knew. The unit worked fine. Of course,long story short,we eventually came in and found the plug dangling from the wall,luckily,if that is the word,the cleaner forgot to replug the unit in which gave us our answer.
This clears up the urban myth. It isn’t one. However it also shows that in reality this shouldn’t happen. Clearly the set of circumstances required for this to occur should be unusual. I say should as I suspect they are far more common that we think. For this to happen first and foremost the server had to be plugged directly into a mains socket. This is a bad thing. The reason for it in this case was that it was a brand new,small scale development and we hadn’t yet got over the need to invest in things like UPSs. Come on,real servers were a big step. Now several years later we have fully rackmount infrastructure with UPSs,air con,fire suppression etc and in getting from point A to point B the chances of this happening has decreased massively. Actually,it’s decreased to zero as we haven’t allowed cleaners into our server spaces since 
.
So as with most things,the devil is in the detail. Plus this gives me a chance to link to another of my favourite urban myths.
As a footnote,we left the site mentioned last year and as we cleared out the remains of the server room we came across a box of power leads that still had the “Do not turn off or unplug under any circumstances.”stickers on them!
