[rescue] FW: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Thu, 1 May 2008, Bill Bradford wrote:

> On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 01:03:01PM -0500, Steve Hatle wrote:
> > Why should that take 30 hours? Hit the Big Red Button and BOOM data center
> > is shut down.
> > Should only take a minute or two at most...
>
> [0] Previously, it had not had any sort of protective cover, labeling,
> etc - everyone just knew what it was.  Now it had a flip-up cover like
> a fire alarm, along with descripive labeling.

Back in my ISP days, ours was labeled "HISTORY ERASER BUTTON".  We
sometimes used it as a shortcut for 2AM Sunday maintenance when we
needed to boot nearly 1,000 dialup users off.  We'd shut down the Suns
and the NetApp, then punch the switch (rather than individually halt
over 30 Netblazers).  Mostly it was just fun to hear 1,000 relays in
the Microcom rack modems all click off at once, like a bunch of angry
crickets. :-)  Silence in a datacenter is always a little eerie,
though...

It was always astonishing to start powering the modems back on at
3:30-4AM on a Sunday and see them start to fill up almost as quickly
as they finished initializing.  "Don't these people have lives?" asked
the guys who were there flying on caffeine patching SunOS4 kernels at
4AM on a Sunday... ah, 1995.  Back when you could actually get a tan
from the Blinky Lights(tm) in the racks and racks of modems, and four
T1's were more than enough bandwidth for 25,000 dialup users...

-- Chris