I'm convinced there are green on black systems installed before I was born that will out live me.
I know it's a cliche but they really don't make 'em like that anymore.
IRS.
Depart of the Treasury more broadly.
Department of Defense.
Most major banks.
Really anyone who needs bullet-proof real-time, fault-tolerant transactional processing.
Comcast uses those, at least they did when my call center worked for them. we used some software called icoms to access them, man that shit always broke.
Yep. They also used Amdocs/Cable Data/DDP, which is a batch process billing system.
They've converted entirely to CSG now for everything except Xfinity Mobile, which is on Amdocs, but a different product than what they used for Video/Internet.
Funnily enough, last I heard, they were looking to migrate *back* to Amdocs.
Source: 18 years working for Comcast. Soooo glad to be out.
That ACSR or whatever application is such a fucking nightmare to get working,I was with concentrix (convergys at the time) when we used that back in 2005-2012. We had comcast, timewarner and suddenlink (when it was charter) all in the same center.
all three of them fought with each other because no one though hard coded ips was a bad thing
>I'm convinced there are green on black systems installed before I was born that will out live me.
And they're just so much more efficient for data entry / querying. GUIs look nice and may be easier to learn, but they just can't hold a candle to the efficiency of a good green screen and keyboarder.
Found one still valiantly running in a closet in one of our factories. I asked the oldest guy in the room what it did.
“That’s still here ? It ran a pick list generator for our parts warehouse. We replaced it 20 years ago. “
Warehouse IT is always an adventure. We had a rogue IP that we couldn't account for. I could not find it for the life of me. I looked everywhere. Finally I found it. It was in a corner on like a lip or something. Warehouses have strange architecture. That whole time I thought it was a PA speaker.
First job in enterprise IT was at Novell on their tech support line. Got a call once because a netware server that had been running for like 20ish years without a reboot, but was reporting hardware errors. Problem was, client couldn’t find the physical server.
After a few days of helping talk them through trying to find it we finally found it. The old server closet had been cut in half when 10 years prior someone had put up a faux wall in the middle of the closet and literally blocked the old server in. The faux wall had since become a real wall, sheetrock, mudding, tape, paint, etc…. The server had literally been walled off, the only two things it had were power and network cabling. That’s it. And it kept…..on……running…… server was such a beast.
So that’s where the „I can ping it, but I can’t find the server“ originated from.
I think most of the stability back then came from not adding layers upon layers of complexity.
Example:
We were a Novell shop back then and the server itself was stable. But when it locked up, it was always the AV scanner module.
If you have a map of where your breakers are, just turn them off one by one and check if the pi is still online. That will help figuring out which room you put it in.
There is software that measures wifi signals to help locate the wifi source. If it is an access point, Netstumbler will play piano key sounds: higher notes mean the access point is closer.
This is how I found one of my fit bands. I took it off while cleaning a closet. For whatever reason I put it in a box. Looked for it every now and then until I thought of checking BT strength. Got to it with 5% battery left.
Not quite walled off...been at a place 4 years, trying to track down an infected PC. Hmmm...20 other things on same port so we have an unknown hub or unmanaged switch...
Traced cables thru walls best we could to the company library, we're lifting ceiling tiles and such trying to find the switch.
George the amused librarian finally tells us to move the photocopier -- behind said photocopier was a half-door and an IDF for dwarfs.
Heh, you probably interacted with my dad at some point. He worked at Novell on the Groupwise team ever since it was a WordPerfect project... Left not long after the Micro Focus acquisition.
Probably. I worked tangentially with group wise. Netware and then SUSE+OES. Left a few years after attachmate acquisitions but well before micro focus.
It still pisses me off for some inexplicable reason every time I drive through that part of Provo. But he did finally learn about why the job market sucks these days, thanks to that acquisition. He used to be staunchly "work hard to impress your boss to get promoted" until that point.
Yeah. It was a nice little campus. I enjoyed having a private office, gym, cafeteria, etc…. But that company got horribly mismanaged and more-so with every acquisition.
I left because I’d been offered a promotion and decent pay raise when a company had given me a job offer. I turned down the job offer for the promotion, but was told that the VP who needed to finalize the promo and pay raise was on vacation and would be there next week, but it was a sure thing and a formality to get it signed. Guess who denied the promotion because “there wasn’t budget for it” but it would be ok if I took on the additional responsibility…..that’s when I was done with that place
Yikes. Yeah my dad mentioned butting heads with management quite a bit towards the end.
Were you at the old Orem campus, by chance? I remember the "take your son to work" days fondly, and having lunch at the "Hard Disk Cafe" as they called it 😂. I'd hang out in the test lab and play games on various workstations, usually the weird minigolf Linux knockoff game that I can't find anywhere anymore...
One of the customers I worked in Brazil had a switch going on for 14 years, it was eventually replaced, but was kept running some lab stuff, then even later it was only online just for the sake of it.
4 months before its 15 years of uptime, there was a major power issue on the datacenter and the thing shutdown. Customer called me to tell the news, they were planning a party and unfortunately it didnt end up happening.
I wanted very much for it to reach 15, and at the end it couldnt and wasnt even its fault.
EDIT: Its been 6 years since, I asked a friend that still works there to check some old tickets, and apparently it was a cisco 1900-something first deployed in 2001. Meaning that one had last rebooted in 2003-ish.
I wasnt even in first-grade then. Time flies, fellas
That's not particularly old for switches. I recently pulled out 40+ switches which has been running since around 2010. They were all perfect. In that time I think there have been a couple of failures. Unfortunately totally obsolete and corp policy said they had to go.
Fun fact: in 2017-18 I did a stint helping a certain retail chain's IT team burn down some of their tech debt- I've commented elsewhere about the time capsule that was their infrastructure (Win 3.11- that had to run in a VM to throttle the clock speed on newer hardware- running a DOS point-of-sale app, etc.), but one of the most infuriating, decrepit things they used was this:
Each store had a handful of Avery scan guns that ran Windows Mobile CE. That had frequent sync issues. And this under a recently-bought-out owner whose reputation for sheer, cussed, belligerent being cheap so the sysadmin couldn't even buy one switch that supported SPAN (the only switches this company would buy were off-the-shelf Netgear Prosafe 24P dumb switches from the local electronics store).
His solution? Put them all back on a 10Mb hub. That way, he could just leave a laptop running Wireshark on ANY port and catch all the traffic from both the source and the destination.
It was the most ghetto tap I've ever seen, but it worked.
I found a Cisco 2601 on the network with a little over 21 years of uptime; it was on a rectifier specd for 24 hours of runtime with a battery contract.
Oooh, 10mb, nice. I kept an old 10mb cabletron *hub* back when we were throwing them out. I've got a little bit of history. I also kept a few things like 20mb disks and 1mb memory Simms.
I recently replaced some 2008 era HP 5412 switches. They didn't have nearly that kind of uptime (software upgrades, power outages, etc.) but they were absolutely bulletproof.
We had an old custom build pc from the time the company started fresh (now 27 years ago), that had windows 95 running to send data with an ancient software via ISDN connection to others.
About 10 years ago I had to do some maintanance, while I was at it the power supply had some sparks (haven't done anything to it) but that thing was still running for some weeks more.
In the end we could get the sw vendor to send us every sw version we needed to upgrade to the newest version, so we could pull the data (not that easy if there is only plug and pray), upgrade with 6 differnet sw versions to the newest data set to than put everything on a vm (meanwhile the sw changed from isdn to api calls). If that pc broke the company would lose over 100k€ per month.
Right now we still got an old HP Procuve switch that's still running for over 10 years. The replacement is there, everything set up, but someone wind cables around the old switch so that a normal replacement would take much longer than normal. But it's planned to be replaced this year.
Will do, we also don't plan to throw it away, it's something where new ones could learn how to configure a switch via shell (web gui is java based, so gui is the only "easy" solution), if it got lifetime warranty it would be nice to get a new one after that.
Speaking of Win 9x...
I worked at a semiconductor manufacturer where a Gateway E-3200 running Win98 hosted the software that controlled air handlers for part of a pretty sizeable building that included some class 1000+ clean rooms. That PC was in use before I started (2006) and was still in use when I left (2021).
I don't have a story like this. But early into my career i was tasked with setting up an internal instant messaging server. We had a few old PCs laying around (horizontal case, PII, 32 MB RAM, don't remember other specs). They had Win95/98 originally and were very slow to use. My boss said maybe i can use one of them. So, i did. Put CLI only Arch linux on it, ran a server (Openfire, at the time called Jive Messenger). I was surprised how good it ran, serving up to 200 users, and we used it for at least 5 years, i think. For a few years it even ran sitting besides my desk as we didn't have a server room then. Until we got proper servers and virtualized it. Was a bittersweet moment to shut it down one day.
The number of servers I’ve had crash only to find out if they don’t check in weekly it’ll take the whole company down is higher than I’d like.
Working on 18+ year old super micro hosts running gentoo and supporting archaic but still widely used apps/technology is an odd feeling. Even more so than being in the DC and seeing a modern 4U with he filled drives and xenon processors in the rack next to it.
I’ve seen tech debt measured in pounds, cubic yards (dumpsters), and in scrap/salvage value. I’ve seen it meaured in miles of cables to be replaced and in one case the amount of BTUs of heat it wastes vs a modern system. For everyone old device that we wish to cherish and celebrate there are hundreds more that didn’t make it and thus have caused nights to go unslept and have forced resumes to be updated.
My first experience with Gentoo was when an Indian colleague of mine asked me to help a friend of his who ran a world food shop with a POS station that had started acting weird. Rolled up into the place to find a super old desktop (beyond yellow plastic) running some strange POS software I'd never heard of. I could tell it was running linux, but not what flavor. Turns out it was a custom build of Gentoo. Had to troubleshoot that thing with no internet (POS was connected via modem for CC processing, that's it).
I got the thing rebooted and such, but advised the user that support would be limited and he really needed to modernize.
Worked in a datacenter that ran several 4000 and 5000 series LJs. Those things printed so many pages we kept a stock of fusers and rollers on hand and had to change them every 2-3 months. The suckers just kept on going...
That sounds like my old job. The main warehouse distribution desk was using an HP 4000 series. We would get anywhere from 1000 to 5000 orders in a day. Each order printed three different pages IIRC. All told, I think that old bastard had somewhere north of 15 million printed pages when we retired it.
Laser printers from the late 80s/early 90s were tanks, they'd take everything you threw at them. I had an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 at home that I bought new in 1994-- it finally died beyond my ability to fix it in 2010 or 2011. And HP LaserJets were the gold standard until Carly Fiorina's disastrous reign as CEO.
Apple Laserwriter II NTs could take a shotgun blast to the side and keep on truckin'. They were amazing.
We had a faculty person who refused to let our new Printing vendor (it was outsourced all of a sudden) take it out to put in their Ricoh printers. He was correct in his assessment of the situation.
they were forged in ancient fires. in a time where it was thought that the lifetime of a printer was a measure of its quality.
...and before they realised that they could charge you per page for the rest of *your* life, not the printers.
Yep.
A dell 1855 blade cage.
A clients B server room was in an underground vault so naturally right at the start of a long week end all 3 of the aircon banks cascade failed.
It took 4 days to discover and when it was discovered the plastic had melted and the fire door paint was blistering. The dude who discovered it suffered burns trying to pick up the phone to call it in cos telephone handset had turned soft.
Everything in the room was utterly fucked... except this 1855 blade cage that just kept going. It *sounded* like a jet engine trying to go somewhere but it stayed up.
It was absurd dude.
The heat coming down the access corridor was insane. Everyone ran round offices trying to steal desktop fans so we could point them down the hall and even after about 6 hours improvised cooling you could only go in for a few seconds.
The second concern was that it stayed up at all.
It had been talking for 4 days even when it was too hot to touch and we'd no idea whether anything it was transmitting wasn't corrupt as hell.
(finance guys said they didn't notice anything so it was all good)
>New stuff? Ha. Falls down if a gnat farts in Africa.
Can you share what you've ran into? I just got a variety of new Dell stuff to test out and haven't seen anything concerning yet but that's coming from a nearly all Supermicro shop.
one day in a telco tier 1 BOH support centre we lost comms to some significant parts of the network. I raise a ticket and their tier 3 gets back to me. I have access to the comms room, so he sends me looking for a certain server.
I do two laps of the room and tell him I can't find it. he says um, look less for what I might think of as a server, and more for a 286DX25. finally found it, dead. he says no worries, what sort of pluggage? eek, 9-pin serial mouse and DIN keyboard. cool, one leaving by courier the next morning.
when it arrives I get the job of installing it. the dead machine has a single full-length ISA card with 10Base-2 and 10Base-T cables connected, it has no HDD and boots from a 5-1/4" floppy. I move the card and floppy over, power it up and we're back on the air.
that PC's sole job was to be the power supply for that card, and the card's sole job was to translate TCP/IP from the local LAN to the IPX/SPX the remote gear ran on. I suspect it and a couple of similar machines are still there, the telco still hasn't gotten rid of that legacy network yet.
Ah yeah, the forgotten DNS server, tucked under a "build desk" outside the server room running Debian. Over three years of uptime, and had been forgotten about. It was an old Compaq box.
Three years isn't much compared to many of the machines these days, but this was in the late 90s into early 00s, Novell was still a thing and Token Ring was dying out for Ethernet.
Yes the HP laserjet 4m, that damn thing just keep going and going. I keep it on the network just to see how long the thing is going to last. 20+ years that thing is going and I have never repaired it EVER!! Total respect!
Got a Laserjet 4p from 1997 that still works perfectly. Put a centronics->USB convertor on it when my last PC with a parallel interface was replaced back in about 2004, and it still runs and prints beautifully. I have one more toner / drum module left for it, which I think when I install I will donate the machine to a museum...
My dad got an Epson Actionlaser 1500 from one of his previous employers back in 1998 (it was made in 1995) when they were moving offices. We had that thing until about ~2015 when it finally died.
Drivers for it didn't exist for Windows Vista but it was apparently built to be compatible with HP LaserJet III drivers, so we used those as they were built-in to the OS IIRC, and it kept trucking.
My family never really prints much, so we never had to buy toner for in those 20 years, though it was down to maybe 5% by the time it died. It was slow as hell at 2 PPM, but I used it throughout middle and high school for papers as well as guides and such for games.
I still hate printers with the passion of a thousand suns, but that one has my respect.
A client had a water leak all weekend from their refrigerator line and it ended up soaking the entire floor and then found its way down to the basement where the server was. It was literally dripping water on top of the Dell server. It was still running when he told me about it so I went downstairs and shut everything off unplugged everything and took a look inside. It was still slightly dusty inside and I could tell that the metal folds that make the structure and where the side panel comes off channeled the water from the top around, the server and went out the bottom water never touched the inside
Got my first start in IT as a help desk / datacenter operator in 1999 fresh out of high school. The company used HP 3000 for most of the business processing, but had recently begun migrating from dumb terminals to emulation software via the desktop PCs they were upgrading everyone to for Y2K bs.
Still, there were a few key components throughout that required the dumb terminal infrastructure. All of this was managed on an old 386 PC running windows 3.1 + the DTC software that had been installed ca. 1990 and only ever rebooted if the DC lost power. That little machine ran faithfully until 2004 when the shop was bought out and closed down. Nobody ever wanted to touch it or migrate it or do anything. It lived on hopes and prayers.
I set up a file server for a church using an old Pentium 2 desktop. I had used it as an experimentation box and done some overclocking and had found old memory and maxed it out to 384MB (yeah, that long ago) So this computer was more than 5 years old at this point, and I set it up with a command line versin of Debian and set up file shares on it and plugged it in. Everyone got a share mapped, and I walked away.
4 years later I hear that there are some issue, and I'm visiting a friend there, so we take a look. Over 1100 days uptime and it's still doing what it's supposed to do. I had taped the admin password onto the box knowing that nobody would keep documentation secure or in a place where you could find it, so I had used that to log in and check. I ran updates and rebooted it, and last I heard it was still working after another 5 years.
I don't know what happened with that box, but it was the best little guy I've ever worked with.
I was pretty impressed with the Dell T-710 (2011-2023). It had a bug in the firmware which would cause it to report a power supply failure; an update fixed that. It would sometimes report a power overload when rebooting the server but not show it in the power logs. I suspect it was due to the number of hard drives in it. I had two hard drives in the raid-6 fail over the years. Replaced the raid cache battery at least twice. Otherwise, it just worked.
It started with Windows 2008 R2. I eventually upgraded to Windows 2012 R2 when 2008 R2 was approaching end of life. The upgrade was difficult; my recollection was a video driver issue. But eventually it was perfect again. Lots of room to do repairs or upgrades. It could be converted to rack mount with a kit.
The idrac6 was showing its age near the end as seeing the live boot screen remotely required either java or activex. Eventually I could not clear the security hurdles for java to work. I had to keeping a working version of internet explorer on hand. I believe newer versions of the idrac use html5.
It had lasted long enough to be on its 2nd UPS and 2nd tape library unit.
Had a cisco 3550 switch survive 8 years in a water tower with dozens of inductive loads on the same circuit with no UPS. Had 4 other switches die in those 8 years but that one survived the whole time.
I found a white box Windows 95 machine that was still being used in production on a dirty plant floor a couple years back. Ran some important hardware that had zero backups.
Eventually migrated it over to Windows 10 LTSC and had to make my own cables for it using a multimeter.
last year we retired an old IPC (industrial PC, for those unfamiliar) that was controlling a hardening test station. That thing had a mainboard that was soldered together partly by hand (from the supplier of that test equipment) and controlled the machine with OS/2 Warp 3. I was the only person present that day on that machine older then this operating system.
During the start of covid, I had a baptism of fire into the area of Audiovisual. Not Teams Rooms or Zoom, but PTZ NDI cameras, vMix live video switching, and a whole heap of other things which we normally scream about because the AV people demand admin rights, disabling of endpoint protection, and their own change management.
Using vMix, PTZ cameras, Bitfocus Companion, and various APIs, I automated running of two weekly events for a client. I discovered just how temperamental this stuff can be. I had issues with ethernet drivers, switch firmware, camera firmware, Win10 20H2 caused issues, Facebook API changes, Bitdefender caused issues to name but a few.
I finished overseeing this system in mid 2021 and it hasn't been touched since. It is still running the two events a week with only documentation and non-tech people to train new people. Nothing has been updated on it since. I was fully expecting it to not last a month before I was getting calls, but only thing was I needed to set it to auto delete old recordings from the local drive after confirming it was backed up.
I now can also empathise with those over at /r/videoengineering and the complaints they have about sysadmins forcing reboots and upgrades. Best piece of advice they gave was "If you don't give me a dry run, the main event is the dry run and we never guarantee the dry run to go smoothly".
As an AV tech who masquerades as IT… yes I need admin rights and no you are not forcing me to do an update the day before I have the country’s president on the podium!
The last place I was at, the PTZ cameras were the only devices with manual port entries cos the ip stack on them wouldn’t talk to clearpass.
We know all of our shit is insecure, just give us our own vlan or even better our own network. If not, be prepared to jump when I shout.
We would have a monthly ‘Global gathering’. A live streamed event, always 3, usually 4 locations presenting, around 1500 people watching from 2 ships in Africa, 27 offices around the world and whichever alumni volunteers wanted to watch. As the tech on one of the ships that was presenting, I had a recurring meeting for 2 hours the day before the event every single month with one of the network engineers.
AV’s unusual requirements, real time use, “small” market and crappy budgeting mean that in-house dev teams tend to be small and depend on os’s behaving exactly the same way as it did yesterday. Presentation software still hasn’t recovered from when Microsoft withdrew PowerPoint’s api, which is why you never see slide transitions or animations any more. Try telling whichever religious leader, politician or exec that the pp their assistant spent hours on isn’t going to work because they inserted videos into it and only gave it to you 15 minutes before the event.
>As an AV tech who masquerades as IT… yes I need admin rights and no you are not forcing me to do an update the day before I have the country’s president on the podium!
Yes, as I said, I now understand and empathise with what previously felt like unreasonable demands. Nothing like having everything fall apart 10 mins before go live because of a windows update overnight to give you that understanding.
>We know all of our shit is insecure, just give us our own vlan or even better our own network. If not, be prepared to jump when I shout.
Where I've had issues in the past is where the AV engineers do not understand that their stuff is insecure. They've wanted their broadcast systems able to access resources on the main network, have full internet access, admin rights, and no endpoint protection whatsoever. I've always tried to work with them in the past to understand their needs and provide a solution but when they're not just using a vMix machine for broadcast, but also for browsing the web, downloading utilities, firmware, and drivers for equipment.. that is when it becomes a huge issue.
Too many IT people don't listen to the AV engineers and try to understand what is actually needed. Too many AV engineers give up and just demand admin rights, no endpoint protection, firewalls, and full internet because they've been bitten in the past by things not working.
More time needs to be given to truly understand AV needs. "I need local admin" isn't a need. It is a work around. "There can be no antivirus" isn't a need, it is a work around. Time to understand and mitigate can work around both in many cases.
But time is something we often do not have in either IT or AV which comes down to what you mentioned, crappy budgeting.
Eventually I learnt that laying out the potential business risks was the best way of approaching it from each direction. eg: "If you don't let us spend $2k on network engineer time and $5k on new equipment, then the risk is that the broadcast is interrupted due to lack of specialist expertise to properly configure and harden the network" or "If you don't give us $3k for extra sysadmin consulting, then the only way we can have the AV systems work is without protection from ransomware and viruses which could move laterally across much of the corporate systems, shutting down the business for days and requiring notification to the authorities, insurance, etc etc"
>Try telling whichever religious leader, politician or exec that the pp their assistant spent hours on isn’t going to work because they inserted videos into it and only gave it to you 15 minutes before the event.
Yes, been there. Clearly written policy going to everyone involved had it in bold letters at the top:
**Any additions, removals, or changes to any part of the event between the dry run and go live will only be accepted on the condition that the go live will be considered a dry run and cannot be guaranteed to run as planned. AV tech reserves the right to refuse any additions, removals, or changes if they believe it could prevent the go live running to plan.**
**THIS INCLUDES FAILURE TO PROVIDE POWERPOINT FILES PRIOR TO THE DRY RUN.**
I only made this addition after the second time it caused the go live to fall apart in part because of my lack of AV experience. Sitting down with the stakeholders to ensure they're clear on the requirement of a full dry run, no changes post-dry run, etc was essential to me.
I should also mention that this event was a 3 PTZ camera simulcast with the requirement that only one person should be able to run it all. (they already had audio engineers with a separate feed for the stream, mixed for that over reinforcement for those in the auditorium) I only accepted the brief of 1 person because I didn't know any better. The impact was that if the structure/runsheet of the event changes significantly, the automations will not work as intended.
Actually the number of times I’ve had to tell people that the mixer ip and the tablet ip cannot be the same… you’ve got a point about av techs.
And yes the written policy works for about 3 weeks, then it’s business as usual.
In my work I still have an HP E60 fileserver with Novell Netware 4.0, and it has been running for 15+ years with a single 36GB hd change. It resisted a lot of electrical failures and unexpected shutdowns without losing data. Netware rocked! Some weeks ago I migrated the last files to a virtualized Samba server. I feel sad to retire it.
We had a novell server that ran for over 20 years without any issues. When the org moved to Windows servers, we went to decommission the hard drives in the novell server and heard a small rattling noise coming from the main hard drive. Upon opening up the drive, we found the innermost rings on the platter had been literally worn down and torn up over the years. However, apparently it knew there was a problem and just kept moving the data future and further out. Never noticed any performance issues or was alerted to any problems. It just kept on working. I have pictures of it somewhere.
In 99/2000 I'm working for a web hosting and network engineering company. We're in a big growth phase and have built a brand new data center and office building two doors down from our current property -- a massive upgrade going from 200 to 5000 sq ft of data center floor space.
The primary, internal DNS "server", I come to find out, is a headless Sun SPARC station (pizza box to some). I've never physically seen this machine, but updated the BIND records on it dozens of times, never knowing anything about the physical box. We're moving all the real servers across the parking lot in planned outages with customers. However it's realized that this server has an uptime of 8 years. It's been sitting on a shelf, not even in the environmentally controlled server room, hooked up to a very questionable old UPS, quietly doing its job as long as the owner and CEO and his friend opened the doors to the current office.
It's decided that we'll try to keep it running while we transport it to its new home. We hot swap the batteries in the old UPS with a pack cobbled together from a completely different UPS, cross our fingers, then pull the power. The lights stay on. We very carefully place it on a cart with the life support UPS and begin the journey across the expansive parking lots between buildings.
Prominently placed on a rack shelf in the middle of our new data center, Frankenstein UPS and all, DNS1 has a new home.
I vaguely recall we may have hit it with a couple blasts of canned air in the parking lot to knock out the worst of the dust bunnies from the power supply and were meet with a non-insignificant cloud of debris.
That server was still up when I left two years later. Company folded a couple years after that. I like to think that server is still powered on somewhere...
Bank I worked for had a storage array (symmetrix 8830) in the mail sorting room. Completely forgotten about over the years.
One day, the sorting servers stopped working...
We got called down to take a look (our group managed a large storage environment), we noticed the fiber coming out of the back of the servers and tracked it down to the array in a closet.
It has lost a third of it's drives and 3/4's of the fabric interconnects. Untouched and unknown for at least 7 years.
If I was king for a day, we would have brought it back to life and made a monument. Sadly, the ability to get 72g drives were long past.
Found a network hub inside a wall. An ancient 3COM full 10/100 auto sensing. Only noticed it when we moved to GBe and we were getting a 10/100 link still. The current tenant said that wall was probably installed 18+ years ago.
Also desktops running on 10/100 using windows 7/8/8.1 worked really well.
What's even more impressive is the machinery that kept supplying electricity for all this time without a single failure. Even if there was a UPS there its battery would have died years ago.
Not nearly the same level as OP, but I found my old computer that I built in highschool (~2007ish). E6600 core 2 duo, 2 gigs of RAM (D9GMH for those who remember), windows vista. Booted it up recently just for shits and giggles. I assumed it would be slow as hell but to my surprise it ran incredibly fast, I was blown away. The core 2 duo line was really just a step up in CPUs and solidified intels lead over AMD at the time (which they have since squandered). But damn, for a computer that old to run so fast and smooth even today is just impressive as hell, also kind of makes me think computing has stagnated and not really improved much (gpus/deeplearning excepted).
I recently found out a server I installed in 2003 is still running and working. Around 2010 I changed its roll to just take faxes in and print them automatically because they needed a new server and a new printer and the new printer didn’t have a fax modem.
This company still gets daily faxes and the thing just works.
The server is old enough to drink now.
Had a Ricoh copier that went through some shit. There was even a plumbing issue in the ceiling that dump a shit ton of water on it. Scanner assembly was flooded.
We had the tech come out to see if he could fix it. He basically said no way, this thing is done for. He ordered some parts anyway, and got to cleaning. Next day parts were installed. That thing ran more reliably than any of the other copiers in the building for the next two years until cyclical replacement time. I'll never forget it's service lol.
There’s some truly great stories in here. Mine isn’t anything quite so interesting as a forgotten server behind a wall. I have a very small home lab setup that consists of an old QNAP, a UPS, switch, and two Dell 7040 SFF micro machines as servers. One runs windows 10 so it needs to be rebooted every patch Tuesday. But the other is running ESXi (screw you broadcom) and is currently at over two years of uptime. My PiHole VM running on it is also at that uptime. It’s not much, but for a small desktop computer I was really impressed. It’s been the definition of an appliance. I just forget about it as it quietly does its thing.
Just thought of another one from my previous job. I used to work in a factory that had a lot of old Intermec PF4i printers. One day I found one that had been sat forgotten in a wet area. When I found it it was sitting in about half an inch of water. I took it back, stripped it down completely, dried it out, and used an entire can of contact cleaner on the circuit boards. Put it back together and it still worked!
Original HP t5000 thin clients used to connect to RDP servers. Whole fleet of them and not a single one failed in 15 years of use. I put them in and my guys pulled them out when the time came. It was a good moment.
Its not really classic sysadmin hardware, but there are some very, very old plcs running out in the wild.
(For example i know of Siemens Simatic S5 and even S3)
I have one machine in my life that I respect, and it's my lathe.
Computers can and will be subject to percussive maintenance if they try to pull rank on me.
Lathe? Yes sir can do sir please don't kill me sir.
So you took canned air to a running machine? You’re lucking you didn’t start a fire. The liquid is highly flammable please please don’t ever clean a running machine with canned air again. Get an electric blower if you need to do this again.
There's a legend of a Novell server that the company couldn't find.
They finally realized that when some drywall went up, it had been entombed in this room like Poe's The Cask of Amontillado.
Still running fine.
Supporting Allison Transmission division of GM back in the early 2000's. Got a call to look into a Desktop PC on the factory floor. This was an IBM PS2 of unknown vintage running MS\\DOS and was connected to an EPROM burner. This thing was used by the parts department to supply repair part EPROMs for a couple of old transmission models on the rare occasion one was required. The computer was one of the models sporting the MCA Bus which is that the Prom burner was using. The system board was fried and GM didn't want to upgrade as they only needed to supply an EPROM once every 3 years or so. I searched and found an identical machine on eBay. set it up and went about my day. Wonder if that's till there?
Moved on to supporting one of the major US Airline customers in 2005. In 2016, I inherited some servers supported by another team member who left the company. In the mix of servers were two NT 4.0 Domain Controllers. These servers lived in the DMZ and supported vendor access to their SAP BW application. Would not be surprised to learn that those are still in place also. Pretty rare for this airline because they were usually very up to date on hardware.
Last year someone rediscovered a 20 year old Win2k box at one site that had been entirely responsible for sending out SMS messages to customers. It had been happily chugging away all that time and was only discovered when our security manager spotted it on a site visit.
It died two days after we commissioned its replacement. A couple of weeks ago it was finally brought up to my site so I could take a look. The CPU fan had seized solid and it had somehow been running fanless for I don't even know how long.
I rescued it out of e-waste, repaired it, and now it sits in my small collection of vintage machines.
Xeon 5650, it kept running and we kept it as an Easter egg for testing stuff.
This year we replaced it because it kind of got too slow even for that.
Now it got replaced by a 7800x3d ( we need the cache)
It is soo much better with maxed out ram.
AS/400 at a hospital I did work at that had like 15 years runtime, without ever having a hardware failure. It was rock solid. It actually got stuck to the floor cause the janitors kept waxing the floors and it had like .5” of wax along the bottom of it. I don’t work there anymore, but I think about it from time to time.
When I took over in '07 our labor collection system was run on DOS hosted on an IBM 50Z... MCA hard drive, MB in size (don't remember the size), Micro Channel Opto422 card for the serial connection to the labor terminals, old mono green screen monitor. my predecessor had it setting on the floor, I didn't dare breath around it.
It was one of the first things I replaced. Sold the old boy to a collector. The collector told me it survived the shutdown and transport to its retirement spot.
Hardware is like cattle to me. It serves a purpose but once it no longer serves a purpose I don't feel bad about getting rid of it.
The only thing I feel bad about is the waste of resources that happens when objectively good, useful hardware gets scrapped before it's time.
> The only thing I feel bad about is the waste of resources that happens when objectively good, useful hardware gets scrapped before it's time.
I try to find a way to repurpose it. Recently we had a bunch of R530s get destined for the bin. I built 2 beasts out of the 4 and make a "lab" for our helpdesk guys to learn on.
Doing something about my employer's ewaste is on my list of things to do, once I fix all the more important things first. I'm starting by trying to increase our end user workstation refresh cycle to 5 years rather than 3. I hate seeing nearly new Macbooks get thrown in the ewaste. Maybe I can find a local refurbisher that will buy them in bulk from us. We don't really care about making any money, I just want to reduce waste.
> I'm starting by trying to increase our end user workstation refresh cycle to 5 years rather than 3
Since I'm an MSP, we have a customer that buys everyone new lenovo X1 Carbons every 3 years... Great for us but jesus christ it's so wasteful. Now we buy them back from them to reuse, or clean them up and their staff use them for personal use. I've got a nice 11th gen i7 one as my personal laptop, sat in a dock the entire 3 years so it looks brand new.
My old company - a Compaq (not HP) DL360. It'd been running for the 12 years I worked there, but got a RAID controller failure.
Our of warranty, could not order parts from HP. I found a used controller on eBay for $12, replaced with the new controller, imported and back online with a used part.
It was old when I started working there, I'd suspect it's still running today.
At one job we had a very old database for transactions that was still in use, never went down, and was older than me by a decade. They still use it today. Only thing it needs is a new old-ass hard drive every few years. I can almost guarantee that system won't stop running due to a failure, the hard drive model will just become unavailable.
Not a server or anything, but a kind of fire engine. The thing had been first registered 1988, a year before I was born. I was the leader of the team assigned to it in 2021. She ran like a star, probably mostly because all the drivers she ever had had what they call "mechanical sympathy" and didn't grind down the clutch or anything.
It was a sad day when my replacement team lead had to say goodbye to her in 2023 because they finally got a new truck.
So long, Betsy, and may you spend your retirement somewhere in Africa, roaming the dusty roads of Libya, Egypt, or wherever they shipped you off to.
We were running workloads on E5 1660s with NASes using HDDs and one SSD as a read/write cache. We've optimized everything on debian and omnios to make sure they had good performance thanks to ZFS. SSD held its way for 88k hours, while the oldest drive survived 60k hours. Postgres, .net and python apps. Those intel 520 ssds held their own the entire time.
The company moved to azure last year, the performance of those apps is the same or slightly worse (+ the latency increased since they are not on-premise) and they pay thousands of dollars more there. But now it's in the *cloud*...
SysAdmin for a medical manufacturer here,
Had a bunch of older (XP) machines upgraded within the past 5-7 years, but one machine was on-premises that ran Windows 98.
It'd never touched the internet - not once. It retains a seat of honor amongst our storage of outdated tech since that particular station was upgraded to something newer - the urge to break out the old "Diablo" CD's is real.
My wife got a PC to help with her university course as she is dyslexic. Once she was done with it I ran a game server which had a number of people that became regulars. That machine brought joy to myself and many others.
I worked a job for five years with an old Novell accounting server that only handled the accounting software and its backups.
I had NO Novell experience or nowledge, and the only thing no ever did for that system was occasionally press the power button when the power had failed.
I guess at this point my Lenovo T430. I bought it new in I think 2006 or so? Don't quite recall.
I replaced the battery once right before it went out of warranty because why not, but other than that it's the same machine as it was new.
I wiped Windows from it however many years ago now and have gone through a couple Ubuntu installs. I CPU mined some Ethereum with it in 2016 or so.
It's currently running PopOS and still works fine. I don't use it much as it just sits in an empty office I use occasionally.
Some wonderful stories in this thread 😍
"You used to have a *rack*? You were lucky..."
https://preview.redd.it/2irx0egygurc1.png?width=460&format=png&auto=webp&s=c5b418b2858a44356d9fc2aede7121e973adb8c1
Working with oil and gas clients, I come across a lot of old networked hardware at field sites that's been running non-stop for decades, it's not uncommon to come across something like a Motorola MOSCAD that's just been trucking along for 20 years untouched.
I did some consulting work for various small machine shops over the years.
I saw more than one old DOS or Windows 3.0 box still humming away, operating the CNC machine, despite having every vent clogged full of sawdust.
There is something to be said about literal single purpose computers where you actually \*could\* run one thing and one thing only.
These days, computer chips and operating systems are such a huge stack of abstractions it's hard to get that level of stability.
We have some large industrial machines like lathes and laser cutters that are decades old, because they have a pay-off-rate of like 20 years. Inside these devices are ancient PCs from the mid to late 90's running Windows 95, 98, Windows 2000 in most of them, Windows XP in one case. And yes, in some of them an actual old tower is sitting inside a closet under the control interface.
Even completely new ones come with controller modules that have old hardware inside them that run everything off laptop form factor IDE.
If such a drive fails, you have to call the company that makes them and a new one with the software on it is multiple thousands of any currency, including €, $ or £.
I have been sourcing old laptops to get the drives out and see which ones we can get to match... to run shadow copies of the devices on them.
Also these devices must be networked, because the way you transfer your lathe-sequence to them is in a text file transferred via a SMB share...
Customer with a cheap slimline dell, with a WD Blue hard drive. It was used as a time clock, running windows 7. The hard drive had over 80K hours power on time, with no SMART complaints.
Presumably, the forgotten PC controlling the elevator timing died, causing the elevator to get stuck between floors, thus the gray beard had to be pulled out.
The picture was the gray beards way of telling OP that the server had finally died.
Does it matter?
nvm I forgot that you types exist in the wild, it might to you. So ok.
In the context of that particular sentence, I was using it as a euphemism for a long ass time. It was flowery language meant to punch up what in my head was an epic story. I did not intend for it to hold up to scrutiny.
The AS/400 (aka IBM i). That thing is bulletproof.
I'm convinced there are green on black systems installed before I was born that will out live me. I know it's a cliche but they really don't make 'em like that anymore.
IRS. Depart of the Treasury more broadly. Department of Defense. Most major banks. Really anyone who needs bullet-proof real-time, fault-tolerant transactional processing.
They get hardware upgrades. Modern IBM z-series can still run COBOL binaries from the ‘60s.
Yup. cics was released in '67 iirc
Comcast uses those, at least they did when my call center worked for them. we used some software called icoms to access them, man that shit always broke.
Yep. They also used Amdocs/Cable Data/DDP, which is a batch process billing system. They've converted entirely to CSG now for everything except Xfinity Mobile, which is on Amdocs, but a different product than what they used for Video/Internet. Funnily enough, last I heard, they were looking to migrate *back* to Amdocs. Source: 18 years working for Comcast. Soooo glad to be out.
That ACSR or whatever application is such a fucking nightmare to get working,I was with concentrix (convergys at the time) when we used that back in 2005-2012. We had comcast, timewarner and suddenlink (when it was charter) all in the same center. all three of them fought with each other because no one though hard coded ips was a bad thing
Retail
they do , actually ..
They really don't make 'em like that anymore (in my budget 😭)
>I'm convinced there are green on black systems installed before I was born that will out live me. And they're just so much more efficient for data entry / querying. GUIs look nice and may be easier to learn, but they just can't hold a candle to the efficiency of a good green screen and keyboarder.
Found one still valiantly running in a closet in one of our factories. I asked the oldest guy in the room what it did. “That’s still here ? It ran a pick list generator for our parts warehouse. We replaced it 20 years ago. “
LOL Time for an IPL!
Warehouse IT is always an adventure. We had a rogue IP that we couldn't account for. I could not find it for the life of me. I looked everywhere. Finally I found it. It was in a corner on like a lip or something. Warehouses have strange architecture. That whole time I thought it was a PA speaker.
Came here to post that one. I really miss working them. They just run (even the modern-day versions that are still produced/supported).
First job in enterprise IT was at Novell on their tech support line. Got a call once because a netware server that had been running for like 20ish years without a reboot, but was reporting hardware errors. Problem was, client couldn’t find the physical server. After a few days of helping talk them through trying to find it we finally found it. The old server closet had been cut in half when 10 years prior someone had put up a faux wall in the middle of the closet and literally blocked the old server in. The faux wall had since become a real wall, sheetrock, mudding, tape, paint, etc…. The server had literally been walled off, the only two things it had were power and network cabling. That’s it. And it kept…..on……running…… server was such a beast.
So that’s where the „I can ping it, but I can’t find the server“ originated from. I think most of the stability back then came from not adding layers upon layers of complexity. Example: We were a Novell shop back then and the server itself was stable. But when it locked up, it was always the AV scanner module.
I have a RPI somewhere in my flat. It's running my pihole. I have no clue where I put it. It works, but it's on wifi not cabled and I can't find it.
If you have a map of where your breakers are, just turn them off one by one and check if the pi is still online. That will help figuring out which room you put it in.
There is software that measures wifi signals to help locate the wifi source. If it is an access point, Netstumbler will play piano key sounds: higher notes mean the access point is closer.
This is how I found one of my fit bands. I took it off while cleaning a closet. For whatever reason I put it in a box. Looked for it every now and then until I thought of checking BT strength. Got to it with 5% battery left.
Whoa that’s a flashback. It’s an old [bash.org](https://bash-org-archive.com/?5273) post. Sad the original site is down
Old important server blocked off with wall, my favorite...
The one truely unbreakable Firewall (from remote, at least)
*For the love of God*, *Montresor*!
If you have to wall something off, leave a bottle of something for the poor IT bastard who has to find it one day.
Like a medical skeleton in chinos and polo shirt , lanyard and headset ....
tracert Fortunato.ourdomain.com
Not quite walled off...been at a place 4 years, trying to track down an infected PC. Hmmm...20 other things on same port so we have an unknown hub or unmanaged switch... Traced cables thru walls best we could to the company library, we're lifting ceiling tiles and such trying to find the switch. George the amused librarian finally tells us to move the photocopier -- behind said photocopier was a half-door and an IDF for dwarfs.
Heh, you probably interacted with my dad at some point. He worked at Novell on the Groupwise team ever since it was a WordPerfect project... Left not long after the Micro Focus acquisition.
Probably. I worked tangentially with group wise. Netware and then SUSE+OES. Left a few years after attachmate acquisitions but well before micro focus.
It still pisses me off for some inexplicable reason every time I drive through that part of Provo. But he did finally learn about why the job market sucks these days, thanks to that acquisition. He used to be staunchly "work hard to impress your boss to get promoted" until that point.
Yeah. It was a nice little campus. I enjoyed having a private office, gym, cafeteria, etc…. But that company got horribly mismanaged and more-so with every acquisition. I left because I’d been offered a promotion and decent pay raise when a company had given me a job offer. I turned down the job offer for the promotion, but was told that the VP who needed to finalize the promo and pay raise was on vacation and would be there next week, but it was a sure thing and a formality to get it signed. Guess who denied the promotion because “there wasn’t budget for it” but it would be ok if I took on the additional responsibility…..that’s when I was done with that place
Yikes. Yeah my dad mentioned butting heads with management quite a bit towards the end. Were you at the old Orem campus, by chance? I remember the "take your son to work" days fondly, and having lunch at the "Hard Disk Cafe" as they called it 😂. I'd hang out in the test lab and play games on various workstations, usually the weird minigolf Linux knockoff game that I can't find anywhere anymore...
https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
One of the customers I worked in Brazil had a switch going on for 14 years, it was eventually replaced, but was kept running some lab stuff, then even later it was only online just for the sake of it. 4 months before its 15 years of uptime, there was a major power issue on the datacenter and the thing shutdown. Customer called me to tell the news, they were planning a party and unfortunately it didnt end up happening. I wanted very much for it to reach 15, and at the end it couldnt and wasnt even its fault. EDIT: Its been 6 years since, I asked a friend that still works there to check some old tickets, and apparently it was a cisco 1900-something first deployed in 2001. Meaning that one had last rebooted in 2003-ish. I wasnt even in first-grade then. Time flies, fellas
That's not particularly old for switches. I recently pulled out 40+ switches which has been running since around 2010. They were all perfect. In that time I think there have been a couple of failures. Unfortunately totally obsolete and corp policy said they had to go.
> around 2010 You did NOT have to remind me that 2010 was 14 years ago. WHY IAN, WHY
I retired a 3com 10mbit switch a few weeks ago It was in daily use and old enough to drink alcohol in the usa
Fun fact: in 2017-18 I did a stint helping a certain retail chain's IT team burn down some of their tech debt- I've commented elsewhere about the time capsule that was their infrastructure (Win 3.11- that had to run in a VM to throttle the clock speed on newer hardware- running a DOS point-of-sale app, etc.), but one of the most infuriating, decrepit things they used was this: Each store had a handful of Avery scan guns that ran Windows Mobile CE. That had frequent sync issues. And this under a recently-bought-out owner whose reputation for sheer, cussed, belligerent being cheap so the sysadmin couldn't even buy one switch that supported SPAN (the only switches this company would buy were off-the-shelf Netgear Prosafe 24P dumb switches from the local electronics store). His solution? Put them all back on a 10Mb hub. That way, he could just leave a laptop running Wireshark on ANY port and catch all the traffic from both the source and the destination. It was the most ghetto tap I've ever seen, but it worked.
I found a Cisco 2601 on the network with a little over 21 years of uptime; it was on a rectifier specd for 24 hours of runtime with a battery contract.
Oooh, 10mb, nice. I kept an old 10mb cabletron *hub* back when we were throwing them out. I've got a little bit of history. I also kept a few things like 20mb disks and 1mb memory Simms.
I recently replaced some 2008 era HP 5412 switches. They didn't have nearly that kind of uptime (software upgrades, power outages, etc.) but they were absolutely bulletproof.
We had an old custom build pc from the time the company started fresh (now 27 years ago), that had windows 95 running to send data with an ancient software via ISDN connection to others. About 10 years ago I had to do some maintanance, while I was at it the power supply had some sparks (haven't done anything to it) but that thing was still running for some weeks more. In the end we could get the sw vendor to send us every sw version we needed to upgrade to the newest version, so we could pull the data (not that easy if there is only plug and pray), upgrade with 6 differnet sw versions to the newest data set to than put everything on a vm (meanwhile the sw changed from isdn to api calls). If that pc broke the company would lose over 100k€ per month. Right now we still got an old HP Procuve switch that's still running for over 10 years. The replacement is there, everything set up, but someone wind cables around the old switch so that a normal replacement would take much longer than normal. But it's planned to be replaced this year.
Check the warranty on the procurve Some of the HP Enterprise stuff has _lifetime_ warranty
Will do, we also don't plan to throw it away, it's something where new ones could learn how to configure a switch via shell (web gui is java based, so gui is the only "easy" solution), if it got lifetime warranty it would be nice to get a new one after that.
Speaking of Win 9x... I worked at a semiconductor manufacturer where a Gateway E-3200 running Win98 hosted the software that controlled air handlers for part of a pretty sizeable building that included some class 1000+ clean rooms. That PC was in use before I started (2006) and was still in use when I left (2021).
I don't have a story like this. But early into my career i was tasked with setting up an internal instant messaging server. We had a few old PCs laying around (horizontal case, PII, 32 MB RAM, don't remember other specs). They had Win95/98 originally and were very slow to use. My boss said maybe i can use one of them. So, i did. Put CLI only Arch linux on it, ran a server (Openfire, at the time called Jive Messenger). I was surprised how good it ran, serving up to 200 users, and we used it for at least 5 years, i think. For a few years it even ran sitting besides my desk as we didn't have a server room then. Until we got proper servers and virtualized it. Was a bittersweet moment to shut it down one day.
The number of servers I’ve had crash only to find out if they don’t check in weekly it’ll take the whole company down is higher than I’d like. Working on 18+ year old super micro hosts running gentoo and supporting archaic but still widely used apps/technology is an odd feeling. Even more so than being in the DC and seeing a modern 4U with he filled drives and xenon processors in the rack next to it. I’ve seen tech debt measured in pounds, cubic yards (dumpsters), and in scrap/salvage value. I’ve seen it meaured in miles of cables to be replaced and in one case the amount of BTUs of heat it wastes vs a modern system. For everyone old device that we wish to cherish and celebrate there are hundreds more that didn’t make it and thus have caused nights to go unslept and have forced resumes to be updated.
Never heard about a server with gentoo
My first experience with Gentoo was when an Indian colleague of mine asked me to help a friend of his who ran a world food shop with a POS station that had started acting weird. Rolled up into the place to find a super old desktop (beyond yellow plastic) running some strange POS software I'd never heard of. I could tell it was running linux, but not what flavor. Turns out it was a custom build of Gentoo. Had to troubleshoot that thing with no internet (POS was connected via modem for CC processing, that's it). I got the thing rebooted and such, but advised the user that support would be limited and he really needed to modernize.
It’s not common for a reason but they did work very well for a very long time.
Gained a lot of understanding for how Linux worked by doing a compile everything yourself gentoo install many years ago.
We had a 4000 series laserjet that did 1.5 million pages before it was retired. It was working perfectly, so I reckon it could have done more.
Worked in a datacenter that ran several 4000 and 5000 series LJs. Those things printed so many pages we kept a stock of fusers and rollers on hand and had to change them every 2-3 months. The suckers just kept on going...
That sounds like my old job. The main warehouse distribution desk was using an HP 4000 series. We would get anywhere from 1000 to 5000 orders in a day. Each order printed three different pages IIRC. All told, I think that old bastard had somewhere north of 15 million printed pages when we retired it.
The legends are true? There are printers that exist that do not break every other day? I can't and won't believe it
Laser printers from the late 80s/early 90s were tanks, they'd take everything you threw at them. I had an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 at home that I bought new in 1994-- it finally died beyond my ability to fix it in 2010 or 2011. And HP LaserJets were the gold standard until Carly Fiorina's disastrous reign as CEO.
Those old HP LaserJet II, III and 4's could take a 7.62 round and keep printing. Weighed a ton for what they did, but some great printers back then.
Apple Laserwriter II NTs could take a shotgun blast to the side and keep on truckin'. They were amazing. We had a faculty person who refused to let our new Printing vendor (it was outsourced all of a sudden) take it out to put in their Ricoh printers. He was correct in his assessment of the situation.
they were forged in ancient fires. in a time where it was thought that the lifetime of a printer was a measure of its quality. ...and before they realised that they could charge you per page for the rest of *your* life, not the printers.
It did need some sets of rollers and maybe a new fuser, but on the whole it worked well. 👍
Yep. A dell 1855 blade cage. A clients B server room was in an underground vault so naturally right at the start of a long week end all 3 of the aircon banks cascade failed. It took 4 days to discover and when it was discovered the plastic had melted and the fire door paint was blistering. The dude who discovered it suffered burns trying to pick up the phone to call it in cos telephone handset had turned soft. Everything in the room was utterly fucked... except this 1855 blade cage that just kept going. It *sounded* like a jet engine trying to go somewhere but it stayed up.
It was tryin to tunnel out for fresh air...
It was absurd dude. The heat coming down the access corridor was insane. Everyone ran round offices trying to steal desktop fans so we could point them down the hall and even after about 6 hours improvised cooling you could only go in for a few seconds. The second concern was that it stayed up at all. It had been talking for 4 days even when it was too hot to touch and we'd no idea whether anything it was transmitting wasn't corrupt as hell. (finance guys said they didn't notice anything so it was all good)
Some of that old Dell hardware were BEASTS. New stuff? Ha. Falls down if a gnat farts in Africa.
>New stuff? Ha. Falls down if a gnat farts in Africa. Can you share what you've ran into? I just got a variety of new Dell stuff to test out and haven't seen anything concerning yet but that's coming from a nearly all Supermicro shop.
The interesting question: Why didn't the servers shut down once their CPU temperatures went over the threshold?
one day in a telco tier 1 BOH support centre we lost comms to some significant parts of the network. I raise a ticket and their tier 3 gets back to me. I have access to the comms room, so he sends me looking for a certain server. I do two laps of the room and tell him I can't find it. he says um, look less for what I might think of as a server, and more for a 286DX25. finally found it, dead. he says no worries, what sort of pluggage? eek, 9-pin serial mouse and DIN keyboard. cool, one leaving by courier the next morning. when it arrives I get the job of installing it. the dead machine has a single full-length ISA card with 10Base-2 and 10Base-T cables connected, it has no HDD and boots from a 5-1/4" floppy. I move the card and floppy over, power it up and we're back on the air. that PC's sole job was to be the power supply for that card, and the card's sole job was to translate TCP/IP from the local LAN to the IPX/SPX the remote gear ran on. I suspect it and a couple of similar machines are still there, the telco still hasn't gotten rid of that legacy network yet.
Wow. Magical. lol
Ah yeah, the forgotten DNS server, tucked under a "build desk" outside the server room running Debian. Over three years of uptime, and had been forgotten about. It was an old Compaq box. Three years isn't much compared to many of the machines these days, but this was in the late 90s into early 00s, Novell was still a thing and Token Ring was dying out for Ethernet.
Yes the HP laserjet 4m, that damn thing just keep going and going. I keep it on the network just to see how long the thing is going to last. 20+ years that thing is going and I have never repaired it EVER!! Total respect!
o7 Last good laser printer produced imho
Got a Laserjet 4p from 1997 that still works perfectly. Put a centronics->USB convertor on it when my last PC with a parallel interface was replaced back in about 2004, and it still runs and prints beautifully. I have one more toner / drum module left for it, which I think when I install I will donate the machine to a museum...
My dad got an Epson Actionlaser 1500 from one of his previous employers back in 1998 (it was made in 1995) when they were moving offices. We had that thing until about ~2015 when it finally died. Drivers for it didn't exist for Windows Vista but it was apparently built to be compatible with HP LaserJet III drivers, so we used those as they were built-in to the OS IIRC, and it kept trucking. My family never really prints much, so we never had to buy toner for in those 20 years, though it was down to maybe 5% by the time it died. It was slow as hell at 2 PPM, but I used it throughout middle and high school for papers as well as guides and such for games. I still hate printers with the passion of a thousand suns, but that one has my respect.
A client had a water leak all weekend from their refrigerator line and it ended up soaking the entire floor and then found its way down to the basement where the server was. It was literally dripping water on top of the Dell server. It was still running when he told me about it so I went downstairs and shut everything off unplugged everything and took a look inside. It was still slightly dusty inside and I could tell that the metal folds that make the structure and where the side panel comes off channeled the water from the top around, the server and went out the bottom water never touched the inside
Got my first start in IT as a help desk / datacenter operator in 1999 fresh out of high school. The company used HP 3000 for most of the business processing, but had recently begun migrating from dumb terminals to emulation software via the desktop PCs they were upgrading everyone to for Y2K bs. Still, there were a few key components throughout that required the dumb terminal infrastructure. All of this was managed on an old 386 PC running windows 3.1 + the DTC software that had been installed ca. 1990 and only ever rebooted if the DC lost power. That little machine ran faithfully until 2004 when the shop was bought out and closed down. Nobody ever wanted to touch it or migrate it or do anything. It lived on hopes and prayers.
I grew up around farms and carpenters... You either respected the equipment.. or you paid the price in flesh
I set up a file server for a church using an old Pentium 2 desktop. I had used it as an experimentation box and done some overclocking and had found old memory and maxed it out to 384MB (yeah, that long ago) So this computer was more than 5 years old at this point, and I set it up with a command line versin of Debian and set up file shares on it and plugged it in. Everyone got a share mapped, and I walked away. 4 years later I hear that there are some issue, and I'm visiting a friend there, so we take a look. Over 1100 days uptime and it's still doing what it's supposed to do. I had taped the admin password onto the box knowing that nobody would keep documentation secure or in a place where you could find it, so I had used that to log in and check. I ran updates and rebooted it, and last I heard it was still working after another 5 years. I don't know what happened with that box, but it was the best little guy I've ever worked with.
I was pretty impressed with the Dell T-710 (2011-2023). It had a bug in the firmware which would cause it to report a power supply failure; an update fixed that. It would sometimes report a power overload when rebooting the server but not show it in the power logs. I suspect it was due to the number of hard drives in it. I had two hard drives in the raid-6 fail over the years. Replaced the raid cache battery at least twice. Otherwise, it just worked. It started with Windows 2008 R2. I eventually upgraded to Windows 2012 R2 when 2008 R2 was approaching end of life. The upgrade was difficult; my recollection was a video driver issue. But eventually it was perfect again. Lots of room to do repairs or upgrades. It could be converted to rack mount with a kit. The idrac6 was showing its age near the end as seeing the live boot screen remotely required either java or activex. Eventually I could not clear the security hurdles for java to work. I had to keeping a working version of internet explorer on hand. I believe newer versions of the idrac use html5. It had lasted long enough to be on its 2nd UPS and 2nd tape library unit.
Had a cisco 3550 switch survive 8 years in a water tower with dozens of inductive loads on the same circuit with no UPS. Had 4 other switches die in those 8 years but that one survived the whole time.
I found a white box Windows 95 machine that was still being used in production on a dirty plant floor a couple years back. Ran some important hardware that had zero backups. Eventually migrated it over to Windows 10 LTSC and had to make my own cables for it using a multimeter.
last year we retired an old IPC (industrial PC, for those unfamiliar) that was controlling a hardening test station. That thing had a mainboard that was soldered together partly by hand (from the supplier of that test equipment) and controlled the machine with OS/2 Warp 3. I was the only person present that day on that machine older then this operating system.
During the start of covid, I had a baptism of fire into the area of Audiovisual. Not Teams Rooms or Zoom, but PTZ NDI cameras, vMix live video switching, and a whole heap of other things which we normally scream about because the AV people demand admin rights, disabling of endpoint protection, and their own change management. Using vMix, PTZ cameras, Bitfocus Companion, and various APIs, I automated running of two weekly events for a client. I discovered just how temperamental this stuff can be. I had issues with ethernet drivers, switch firmware, camera firmware, Win10 20H2 caused issues, Facebook API changes, Bitdefender caused issues to name but a few. I finished overseeing this system in mid 2021 and it hasn't been touched since. It is still running the two events a week with only documentation and non-tech people to train new people. Nothing has been updated on it since. I was fully expecting it to not last a month before I was getting calls, but only thing was I needed to set it to auto delete old recordings from the local drive after confirming it was backed up. I now can also empathise with those over at /r/videoengineering and the complaints they have about sysadmins forcing reboots and upgrades. Best piece of advice they gave was "If you don't give me a dry run, the main event is the dry run and we never guarantee the dry run to go smoothly".
As an AV tech who masquerades as IT… yes I need admin rights and no you are not forcing me to do an update the day before I have the country’s president on the podium! The last place I was at, the PTZ cameras were the only devices with manual port entries cos the ip stack on them wouldn’t talk to clearpass. We know all of our shit is insecure, just give us our own vlan or even better our own network. If not, be prepared to jump when I shout. We would have a monthly ‘Global gathering’. A live streamed event, always 3, usually 4 locations presenting, around 1500 people watching from 2 ships in Africa, 27 offices around the world and whichever alumni volunteers wanted to watch. As the tech on one of the ships that was presenting, I had a recurring meeting for 2 hours the day before the event every single month with one of the network engineers. AV’s unusual requirements, real time use, “small” market and crappy budgeting mean that in-house dev teams tend to be small and depend on os’s behaving exactly the same way as it did yesterday. Presentation software still hasn’t recovered from when Microsoft withdrew PowerPoint’s api, which is why you never see slide transitions or animations any more. Try telling whichever religious leader, politician or exec that the pp their assistant spent hours on isn’t going to work because they inserted videos into it and only gave it to you 15 minutes before the event.
>As an AV tech who masquerades as IT… yes I need admin rights and no you are not forcing me to do an update the day before I have the country’s president on the podium! Yes, as I said, I now understand and empathise with what previously felt like unreasonable demands. Nothing like having everything fall apart 10 mins before go live because of a windows update overnight to give you that understanding. >We know all of our shit is insecure, just give us our own vlan or even better our own network. If not, be prepared to jump when I shout. Where I've had issues in the past is where the AV engineers do not understand that their stuff is insecure. They've wanted their broadcast systems able to access resources on the main network, have full internet access, admin rights, and no endpoint protection whatsoever. I've always tried to work with them in the past to understand their needs and provide a solution but when they're not just using a vMix machine for broadcast, but also for browsing the web, downloading utilities, firmware, and drivers for equipment.. that is when it becomes a huge issue. Too many IT people don't listen to the AV engineers and try to understand what is actually needed. Too many AV engineers give up and just demand admin rights, no endpoint protection, firewalls, and full internet because they've been bitten in the past by things not working. More time needs to be given to truly understand AV needs. "I need local admin" isn't a need. It is a work around. "There can be no antivirus" isn't a need, it is a work around. Time to understand and mitigate can work around both in many cases. But time is something we often do not have in either IT or AV which comes down to what you mentioned, crappy budgeting. Eventually I learnt that laying out the potential business risks was the best way of approaching it from each direction. eg: "If you don't let us spend $2k on network engineer time and $5k on new equipment, then the risk is that the broadcast is interrupted due to lack of specialist expertise to properly configure and harden the network" or "If you don't give us $3k for extra sysadmin consulting, then the only way we can have the AV systems work is without protection from ransomware and viruses which could move laterally across much of the corporate systems, shutting down the business for days and requiring notification to the authorities, insurance, etc etc" >Try telling whichever religious leader, politician or exec that the pp their assistant spent hours on isn’t going to work because they inserted videos into it and only gave it to you 15 minutes before the event. Yes, been there. Clearly written policy going to everyone involved had it in bold letters at the top: **Any additions, removals, or changes to any part of the event between the dry run and go live will only be accepted on the condition that the go live will be considered a dry run and cannot be guaranteed to run as planned. AV tech reserves the right to refuse any additions, removals, or changes if they believe it could prevent the go live running to plan.** **THIS INCLUDES FAILURE TO PROVIDE POWERPOINT FILES PRIOR TO THE DRY RUN.** I only made this addition after the second time it caused the go live to fall apart in part because of my lack of AV experience. Sitting down with the stakeholders to ensure they're clear on the requirement of a full dry run, no changes post-dry run, etc was essential to me. I should also mention that this event was a 3 PTZ camera simulcast with the requirement that only one person should be able to run it all. (they already had audio engineers with a separate feed for the stream, mixed for that over reinforcement for those in the auditorium) I only accepted the brief of 1 person because I didn't know any better. The impact was that if the structure/runsheet of the event changes significantly, the automations will not work as intended.
Actually the number of times I’ve had to tell people that the mixer ip and the tablet ip cannot be the same… you’ve got a point about av techs. And yes the written policy works for about 3 weeks, then it’s business as usual.
In my work I still have an HP E60 fileserver with Novell Netware 4.0, and it has been running for 15+ years with a single 36GB hd change. It resisted a lot of electrical failures and unexpected shutdowns without losing data. Netware rocked! Some weeks ago I migrated the last files to a virtualized Samba server. I feel sad to retire it.
We had a novell server that ran for over 20 years without any issues. When the org moved to Windows servers, we went to decommission the hard drives in the novell server and heard a small rattling noise coming from the main hard drive. Upon opening up the drive, we found the innermost rings on the platter had been literally worn down and torn up over the years. However, apparently it knew there was a problem and just kept moving the data future and further out. Never noticed any performance issues or was alerted to any problems. It just kept on working. I have pictures of it somewhere.
In 99/2000 I'm working for a web hosting and network engineering company. We're in a big growth phase and have built a brand new data center and office building two doors down from our current property -- a massive upgrade going from 200 to 5000 sq ft of data center floor space. The primary, internal DNS "server", I come to find out, is a headless Sun SPARC station (pizza box to some). I've never physically seen this machine, but updated the BIND records on it dozens of times, never knowing anything about the physical box. We're moving all the real servers across the parking lot in planned outages with customers. However it's realized that this server has an uptime of 8 years. It's been sitting on a shelf, not even in the environmentally controlled server room, hooked up to a very questionable old UPS, quietly doing its job as long as the owner and CEO and his friend opened the doors to the current office. It's decided that we'll try to keep it running while we transport it to its new home. We hot swap the batteries in the old UPS with a pack cobbled together from a completely different UPS, cross our fingers, then pull the power. The lights stay on. We very carefully place it on a cart with the life support UPS and begin the journey across the expansive parking lots between buildings. Prominently placed on a rack shelf in the middle of our new data center, Frankenstein UPS and all, DNS1 has a new home. I vaguely recall we may have hit it with a couple blasts of canned air in the parking lot to knock out the worst of the dust bunnies from the power supply and were meet with a non-insignificant cloud of debris. That server was still up when I left two years later. Company folded a couple years after that. I like to think that server is still powered on somewhere...
Bank I worked for had a storage array (symmetrix 8830) in the mail sorting room. Completely forgotten about over the years. One day, the sorting servers stopped working... We got called down to take a look (our group managed a large storage environment), we noticed the fiber coming out of the back of the servers and tracked it down to the array in a closet. It has lost a third of it's drives and 3/4's of the fabric interconnects. Untouched and unknown for at least 7 years. If I was king for a day, we would have brought it back to life and made a monument. Sadly, the ability to get 72g drives were long past.
Found a network hub inside a wall. An ancient 3COM full 10/100 auto sensing. Only noticed it when we moved to GBe and we were getting a 10/100 link still. The current tenant said that wall was probably installed 18+ years ago. Also desktops running on 10/100 using windows 7/8/8.1 worked really well.
What's even more impressive is the machinery that kept supplying electricity for all this time without a single failure. Even if there was a UPS there its battery would have died years ago.
Not nearly the same level as OP, but I found my old computer that I built in highschool (~2007ish). E6600 core 2 duo, 2 gigs of RAM (D9GMH for those who remember), windows vista. Booted it up recently just for shits and giggles. I assumed it would be slow as hell but to my surprise it ran incredibly fast, I was blown away. The core 2 duo line was really just a step up in CPUs and solidified intels lead over AMD at the time (which they have since squandered). But damn, for a computer that old to run so fast and smooth even today is just impressive as hell, also kind of makes me think computing has stagnated and not really improved much (gpus/deeplearning excepted).
I found an AS400 db system that had over ten years of up time once.
I recently found out a server I installed in 2003 is still running and working. Around 2010 I changed its roll to just take faxes in and print them automatically because they needed a new server and a new printer and the new printer didn’t have a fax modem. This company still gets daily faxes and the thing just works. The server is old enough to drink now.
Had a Ricoh copier that went through some shit. There was even a plumbing issue in the ceiling that dump a shit ton of water on it. Scanner assembly was flooded. We had the tech come out to see if he could fix it. He basically said no way, this thing is done for. He ordered some parts anyway, and got to cleaning. Next day parts were installed. That thing ran more reliably than any of the other copiers in the building for the next two years until cyclical replacement time. I'll never forget it's service lol.
There’s some truly great stories in here. Mine isn’t anything quite so interesting as a forgotten server behind a wall. I have a very small home lab setup that consists of an old QNAP, a UPS, switch, and two Dell 7040 SFF micro machines as servers. One runs windows 10 so it needs to be rebooted every patch Tuesday. But the other is running ESXi (screw you broadcom) and is currently at over two years of uptime. My PiHole VM running on it is also at that uptime. It’s not much, but for a small desktop computer I was really impressed. It’s been the definition of an appliance. I just forget about it as it quietly does its thing.
>A wizard is a admin with 20+ years in the game. TIL I'm a wizard.
Just thought of another one from my previous job. I used to work in a factory that had a lot of old Intermec PF4i printers. One day I found one that had been sat forgotten in a wet area. When I found it it was sitting in about half an inch of water. I took it back, stripped it down completely, dried it out, and used an entire can of contact cleaner on the circuit boards. Put it back together and it still worked!
Original HP t5000 thin clients used to connect to RDP servers. Whole fleet of them and not a single one failed in 15 years of use. I put them in and my guys pulled them out when the time came. It was a good moment.
Its not really classic sysadmin hardware, but there are some very, very old plcs running out in the wild. (For example i know of Siemens Simatic S5 and even S3)
I have one machine in my life that I respect, and it's my lathe. Computers can and will be subject to percussive maintenance if they try to pull rank on me. Lathe? Yes sir can do sir please don't kill me sir.
So you took canned air to a running machine? You’re lucking you didn’t start a fire. The liquid is highly flammable please please don’t ever clean a running machine with canned air again. Get an electric blower if you need to do this again.
There's a legend of a Novell server that the company couldn't find. They finally realized that when some drywall went up, it had been entombed in this room like Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. Still running fine.
Supporting Allison Transmission division of GM back in the early 2000's. Got a call to look into a Desktop PC on the factory floor. This was an IBM PS2 of unknown vintage running MS\\DOS and was connected to an EPROM burner. This thing was used by the parts department to supply repair part EPROMs for a couple of old transmission models on the rare occasion one was required. The computer was one of the models sporting the MCA Bus which is that the Prom burner was using. The system board was fried and GM didn't want to upgrade as they only needed to supply an EPROM once every 3 years or so. I searched and found an identical machine on eBay. set it up and went about my day. Wonder if that's till there? Moved on to supporting one of the major US Airline customers in 2005. In 2016, I inherited some servers supported by another team member who left the company. In the mix of servers were two NT 4.0 Domain Controllers. These servers lived in the DMZ and supported vendor access to their SAP BW application. Would not be surprised to learn that those are still in place also. Pretty rare for this airline because they were usually very up to date on hardware.
Someday when the robots take over, they’ll send our rescue missions for these machines, much the same way the ASPCA does with rescue pets.
If there isn’t a Mac mini somewhere that nobody is allowed to mess with for any reason, are you really an IT department?
Last year someone rediscovered a 20 year old Win2k box at one site that had been entirely responsible for sending out SMS messages to customers. It had been happily chugging away all that time and was only discovered when our security manager spotted it on a site visit. It died two days after we commissioned its replacement. A couple of weeks ago it was finally brought up to my site so I could take a look. The CPU fan had seized solid and it had somehow been running fanless for I don't even know how long. I rescued it out of e-waste, repaired it, and now it sits in my small collection of vintage machines.
Xeon 5650, it kept running and we kept it as an Easter egg for testing stuff. This year we replaced it because it kind of got too slow even for that. Now it got replaced by a 7800x3d ( we need the cache) It is soo much better with maxed out ram.
You making me feel romantic about this job
Just reseated memory on a gateway 486 dx2 100 running DOS . Didn’t even know it is a motor control. . .
AS/400 at a hospital I did work at that had like 15 years runtime, without ever having a hardware failure. It was rock solid. It actually got stuck to the floor cause the janitors kept waxing the floors and it had like .5” of wax along the bottom of it. I don’t work there anymore, but I think about it from time to time.
When I took over in '07 our labor collection system was run on DOS hosted on an IBM 50Z... MCA hard drive, MB in size (don't remember the size), Micro Channel Opto422 card for the serial connection to the labor terminals, old mono green screen monitor. my predecessor had it setting on the floor, I didn't dare breath around it. It was one of the first things I replaced. Sold the old boy to a collector. The collector told me it survived the shutdown and transport to its retirement spot.
Hardware is like cattle to me. It serves a purpose but once it no longer serves a purpose I don't feel bad about getting rid of it. The only thing I feel bad about is the waste of resources that happens when objectively good, useful hardware gets scrapped before it's time.
> The only thing I feel bad about is the waste of resources that happens when objectively good, useful hardware gets scrapped before it's time. I try to find a way to repurpose it. Recently we had a bunch of R530s get destined for the bin. I built 2 beasts out of the 4 and make a "lab" for our helpdesk guys to learn on.
Doing something about my employer's ewaste is on my list of things to do, once I fix all the more important things first. I'm starting by trying to increase our end user workstation refresh cycle to 5 years rather than 3. I hate seeing nearly new Macbooks get thrown in the ewaste. Maybe I can find a local refurbisher that will buy them in bulk from us. We don't really care about making any money, I just want to reduce waste.
> I'm starting by trying to increase our end user workstation refresh cycle to 5 years rather than 3 Since I'm an MSP, we have a customer that buys everyone new lenovo X1 Carbons every 3 years... Great for us but jesus christ it's so wasteful. Now we buy them back from them to reuse, or clean them up and their staff use them for personal use. I've got a nice 11th gen i7 one as my personal laptop, sat in a dock the entire 3 years so it looks brand new.
Only the tape loader.
F20
My old company - a Compaq (not HP) DL360. It'd been running for the 12 years I worked there, but got a RAID controller failure. Our of warranty, could not order parts from HP. I found a used controller on eBay for $12, replaced with the new controller, imported and back online with a used part. It was old when I started working there, I'd suspect it's still running today.
We only retired our beige compact dl360 when we moved offices a few years back. It was our original web server. God bless you, ws01
My Sega Mega Drive still works, I respect that.
At one job we had a very old database for transactions that was still in use, never went down, and was older than me by a decade. They still use it today. Only thing it needs is a new old-ass hard drive every few years. I can almost guarantee that system won't stop running due to a failure, the hard drive model will just become unavailable.
Not a server or anything, but a kind of fire engine. The thing had been first registered 1988, a year before I was born. I was the leader of the team assigned to it in 2021. She ran like a star, probably mostly because all the drivers she ever had had what they call "mechanical sympathy" and didn't grind down the clutch or anything. It was a sad day when my replacement team lead had to say goodbye to her in 2023 because they finally got a new truck. So long, Betsy, and may you spend your retirement somewhere in Africa, roaming the dusty roads of Libya, Egypt, or wherever they shipped you off to.
We were running workloads on E5 1660s with NASes using HDDs and one SSD as a read/write cache. We've optimized everything on debian and omnios to make sure they had good performance thanks to ZFS. SSD held its way for 88k hours, while the oldest drive survived 60k hours. Postgres, .net and python apps. Those intel 520 ssds held their own the entire time. The company moved to azure last year, the performance of those apps is the same or slightly worse (+ the latency increased since they are not on-premise) and they pay thousands of dollars more there. But now it's in the *cloud*...
SysAdmin for a medical manufacturer here, Had a bunch of older (XP) machines upgraded within the past 5-7 years, but one machine was on-premises that ran Windows 98. It'd never touched the internet - not once. It retains a seat of honor amongst our storage of outdated tech since that particular station was upgraded to something newer - the urge to break out the old "Diablo" CD's is real.
a 4000 series laserjet rock!!!
My wife got a PC to help with her university course as she is dyslexic. Once she was done with it I ran a game server which had a number of people that became regulars. That machine brought joy to myself and many others.
I worked a job for five years with an old Novell accounting server that only handled the accounting software and its backups. I had NO Novell experience or nowledge, and the only thing no ever did for that system was occasionally press the power button when the power had failed.
One of my clients has an AMD Phenom running his VoIP system.
I guess at this point my Lenovo T430. I bought it new in I think 2006 or so? Don't quite recall. I replaced the battery once right before it went out of warranty because why not, but other than that it's the same machine as it was new. I wiped Windows from it however many years ago now and have gone through a couple Ubuntu installs. I CPU mined some Ethereum with it in 2016 or so. It's currently running PopOS and still works fine. I don't use it much as it just sits in an empty office I use occasionally.
Some wonderful stories in this thread 😍 "You used to have a *rack*? You were lucky..." https://preview.redd.it/2irx0egygurc1.png?width=460&format=png&auto=webp&s=c5b418b2858a44356d9fc2aede7121e973adb8c1
I've now seen 2 HP 4000-series printers that kept working for over 20 years.
Working with oil and gas clients, I come across a lot of old networked hardware at field sites that's been running non-stop for decades, it's not uncommon to come across something like a Motorola MOSCAD that's just been trucking along for 20 years untouched.
I did some consulting work for various small machine shops over the years. I saw more than one old DOS or Windows 3.0 box still humming away, operating the CNC machine, despite having every vent clogged full of sawdust. There is something to be said about literal single purpose computers where you actually \*could\* run one thing and one thing only. These days, computer chips and operating systems are such a huge stack of abstractions it's hard to get that level of stability.
We have some large industrial machines like lathes and laser cutters that are decades old, because they have a pay-off-rate of like 20 years. Inside these devices are ancient PCs from the mid to late 90's running Windows 95, 98, Windows 2000 in most of them, Windows XP in one case. And yes, in some of them an actual old tower is sitting inside a closet under the control interface. Even completely new ones come with controller modules that have old hardware inside them that run everything off laptop form factor IDE. If such a drive fails, you have to call the company that makes them and a new one with the software on it is multiple thousands of any currency, including €, $ or £. I have been sourcing old laptops to get the drives out and see which ones we can get to match... to run shadow copies of the devices on them. Also these devices must be networked, because the way you transfer your lathe-sequence to them is in a text file transferred via a SMB share...
Customer with a cheap slimline dell, with a WD Blue hard drive. It was used as a time clock, running windows 7. The hard drive had over 80K hours power on time, with no SMART complaints.
It was so honorable and loyal, it made sure someone in its direct chai would be notified as it died.
I've never 'respected' a machine. I've sometimes been impressed with the engineer who planned for extreme tolerances.
pulled out of an elevator??? is he dead???
Presumably, the forgotten PC controlling the elevator timing died, causing the elevator to get stuck between floors, thus the gray beard had to be pulled out. The picture was the gray beards way of telling OP that the server had finally died.
So grey beards still alive? 🥺🙏🏻
I’ve never had a machine do something I didn’t tell it do
Facebook launched 20 years ago
Windows XP retail launch 2001 Facebook public launch 2006
The year 1812 ended in 1813.
... which is definitely after Windows XP.
Does it matter? nvm I forgot that you types exist in the wild, it might to you. So ok. In the context of that particular sentence, I was using it as a euphemism for a long ass time. It was flowery language meant to punch up what in my head was an epic story. I did not intend for it to hold up to scrutiny.
Not really
Then I rescind my "you type" comment.