All charged up with nowhere to go
“Hey,” Reeve said, “While you’re here…”
Those few words make the phrase that every IT worker fears most. It’s an infinitely vague intro to perform a service that someone considers simple at first, but often involves a massive amount of work. It’s along the same lines as, “Can I pick your brain real quick?” and “I have an easy one for you.”
Or maybe my fear was fueled more by hunger. Given where I was, steak would be great. Or a burger. Something heavy and meaty, something that had previously spent a lot of time mooing.
Hello, my name is Dev Manny, and I’m a porcivore. (That’s from the Latin porcus, meaning “everything tastes better with bacon“.)
I’m also an Information Technology Private Investigator, which is why I was at Reeve’s Elite Meets and Eats, exploring the culinary oddity of fusion cuisine. Reeve’s was a coffee bar and butcher shop. Get fresh cut roast beef for dinner while sampling a wide array of coffee drinks and listening to piped-in jazz. I was currently sipping on an “Angry Cow”, a shot of whole milk mixed with a shot of Red Bull. It had the interesting distinction of being both far tastier and more disgusting than I ever would’ve imagined.
Reeve’s Elite Meets and Eats was a high-end business, one of those lucky locations with plenty of foot traffic from the upper-crust of the upper-class. It meant that Reeve could afford the rent and still have plenty of money to pour back into his store.
I’d just hooked up some new equipment for him. He’d handed over the butchering and barista duties to his underlings, and stood with me in the back of the store, appreciating the new hardware: A credit card scanner, a receipt printer and a window-mounted, scrolling LED sign that flashed, “Blood pressure is evil. It must be punished.”
Given that philosophy, and the fact he was a pretty huge guy, I guessed that Reeve didn’t have a lot of cardiac doctors stopping by his store.
“While you’re here, check this out for me, okay?”
I ignored the vagueness of the request and followed. At least I was paid by the hour.
Reeve lead me to a back room, then unlocked and opened a door to an even smaller room. I felt a whoosh of cold air.
Inside the room, a server rested on a plastic table, and next to it sat a monitor, keyboard, mouse and laser printer. Overhead on the wall, an air-conditioner blasted freezing air over our heads.
Reeve’s Meets and Eats was cold. It had to be, with so much meat out on display. He’d copied the theme for his server room, too.
“Computers don’t like heat,” Reeve said. “It wears them out quicker. Makes them malfunction. I’ve done all I can to keep this room as cold as I can. Got the AC running non-stop. I only come in to change backup drives and get printouts. This printer prints on and off during the day for incoming orders, faxes and product shipping information, that kind of stuff.”
“Okay…” I said slowly. “So, the problem is-”
“The server’s not working!”
Not helpful. That was like going to the doctor and saying, “My body’s not working!”
“You’ll have to be a bit more specific,” I said. “Got any symptoms?”
“Sometimes I can get to it from my other PCs, sometimes I can’t. It handles file storage and my sales database software. I know it’s not my checkout terminals, because they all have the problem – sometimes they just can’t connect. So I’ve replaced all the hardware leading into this room – all the cabling and switches. Just the other week, I switched out the server itself and reloaded the OS. Same problem: Every once in a while, I get weird behavior. The thing locks up, hangs, or needs a reboot before it’ll talk again.”
I thought about that. While probably overkill and expensive, he’d done a good thing from a troubleshooting perspective – start replacing all the points in the communications chain until you hit the cause. But if no one component was the cause…
“Reeve, I think your problem is environmental, not physical. I think you might have excess static build-up. And when it discharges, its hurting your server, and it temporarily drops off the network.”
He looked skeptical. ”Nah. The metal server case protects it from static, right?”
“Not if you’re plugging in backup drives every day. Not if you’re cranking the AC, a dehumidifier. It’s so dry in here that static can build up much easier than normal.”
“Well, maybe, but it can’t build up that much.”
“True. You won’t have server problems just from having it in a dry room. But you’ve also got the equipment sitting on a plastic table, a good way to retain static. You also didn’t replace the printer. Might want to check that, too, or put it in a different room for a while. Printers are great static electricity generators. They’re supposed to have discharge strips – short pieces of tinsel that hang over the paper as it comes out, but I don’t see any on yours.”
I pointed down at the rubber booties he wore over his shoes. “Those aren’t helping either. Good for cleanliness, bad for static discharge. Also, a server doesn’t need to be freezing cold, it just doesn’t like to be hot. There’s a difference.”
Reeve was starting to look like the human personification of an Angry Cow.
“Look,” I said, trying to reassure him. “It’s great that you’re so careful about heat. But you still have to balance your environment, and taking things to extremes can cause other issues.”
“So what do I do?”
“I would try two things. First, get more humidity in the room. Computers don’t like too much, but as long as you keep it within the recommend server tolerances, you’ll be fine. Usually humidity isn’t an issue, but I think there are other factors contributing to the problem. Keeping the air around forty-five percent humidity and seventy-two degrees is fine for this equipment. Second, change your room design so that static isn’t an issue. Move the printer away from the server, or make sure the static tinsel strips are working. Replace the plastic table with a metal one. Purchase a grounding mat, and put it right here,” I pointed on the ground in front of the server. “Stand on it while you’re doing server work.”
“That’ll fix my problem?”
“No promises,” I smiled. “But we have to start somewhere.”
I would’ve liked to stay and spend time on an onsite analysis, but not today. The Angry Cow wasn’t sitting well in my stomach. I felt flushed, too hot, and needed to get out. Away from the bitter, musky smell of ground coffee mixing with the distinctive, heavy odor of raw meat.
I could take a clue from how I’d just helped Reeve: A heavy focus on a cold environment might lead to new problems. In my case, going to extremes like an Angry Cow might seem fun, but could cause expected problems.
Was I going to become vegetarian? Drop all caffeine drinks in favor of all-natural wheat grass and blended tofu? Nope, that’s just another too-extreme run in the opposite direction.
With my new outlook on life, I’d start simple and focus on just one thing:
No more coffee drinks with the word “angry” in the name.
