[geeks] So what is the biggest machine you have lost in your house?

[alex j avriette]

On Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 06:53 PM, Big Endian wrote:

>> we just found an ultra10 which had been missing for weeks (but up and 
>> pingable).
>
> Is that like the netware server behind a wall thing?

nah. as it turns out it lived on a bakers rack of boxes:

http://satan.posixnap.net/~alex/scorch/Documents/pics/puterpics/DSC01250.JPG

its the one on the top left.

the problem is all these U10's are so generic looking, and it really was 
on the wrong rack (truth be told thats my rack, and i had never even 
paid attention to it figuring it was somebody elses problem.. i mean 
box...). at any rate, the story is we found a whole metric 
assload^W^Wtreasure trove of scripts that were running `rsh user atd26 
command`. the scripts had literally been written years ago, and nobody 
knew who owned atd26, or where it physically was, or even what the root 
password was! the "password scheme" didnt work. eventually somebody 
found a box that had root trusted in its rhosts to atd26. turns out 
there are 250-some-odd users on this box, all of which are various 
components of various other scripts, and we havent even gotten to the 
point of being able to have a list of scripts that are using it.

so after we figured out how to get in to the box, a couple days later, i 
was poking around on my boxes, and realized that the one i had been 
ignoring for a year or so turned out to be the missing atd26. so now we 
just keep power to it and keep its network connection alive (we moved it 
to the diesels after realizing how important it was), because it is the 
one box that wasnt moved to our new architecture. (moved from one E3500 
to 4 E3500's, 8 280R's, and 16 Netra X1s)

sooner or later somebody (probably me) is going to have to do a massive 
recursive grep and find every script that wants atd26 to be alive and 
modify them to accommodate a new machine. ah the joys of maintaining 
unmaintainable, unorthogonal, and heavily coupled code.

alex