Missing server found... behind a wall...

April 10, 2001 12:45 PM

Missing server found... behind a wall... Got this from Scott's site and thought I would share it. I'm just amazed the thing stayed up for so long.
posted by starvingartist (11 comments total)

Gee....... I wonder if the server was running NT?
posted by y6y6y6 at 12:47 PM on April 10, 2001

From the article, it looks like it was Netware. It stayed up, but more than likely, they had nothing important running on it ;-)
posted by samsara at 1:03 PM on April 10, 2001

It most assuredly wasn't running microsoft products. I'm lucky to get through 8 hours without a reboot at work and I usually don't use anything outside of Office2000
posted by revbrian at 1:20 PM on April 10, 2001

If this is a fake story planted by the hardware or software manufacturer's PR people, said firm gets my vote creativity. Excellent!
posted by ParisParamus at 1:52 PM on April 10, 2001

I heard this story a couple of years ago about an AS/400. With an AS/400 it is at least possible, though not probable.
posted by cludwig at 2:08 PM on April 10, 2001

It reminds me of one of those Japanese soldiers that never learned about the end of the war, staying on post in the jungles of New Guinea for twenty years.
posted by rodii at 4:43 PM on April 10, 2001

Windows sucks blah blah blah. To counter revbrian's experience, I've got 15 Windows NT or Windows 2000 machines that I haven't rebooted in 14 months -- and then, they were booted because I moved them from another building to where they now sit. Some are running Oracle servers, others are running IIS, and others are running Frontier servers; I've found that they key is not to overload them with services.
posted by delfuego at 5:32 PM on April 10, 2001

This reminds me so much of something I think I read in BoingBoing (Print edition). Somebody had a little fantasy of sneaking a Mac SE into someone's attic, setting it up with stable BBS software, and sneaking an extra phoneline up to it, that they would pay a ton of upfront money on, and just leave it there to be discovered one day. At the time I thought it was terribly romantic. I know it was a while back, because I remember the day I read it, I also purchased my first 2400 baud modem off a friend (and secret Metafilterer), and the computer I was going to hook it up to was the same "ancient" model being described in the story.
posted by thirteen at 5:44 PM on April 10, 2001

That does sound fake, if only because I don't think it would take a networking expert from Novell to trace some ethernet cable around a building.
posted by endquote at 7:19 PM on April 10, 2001

Every time they pinged it, it replied with "For the love of God, Montressor!"
posted by chuq at 2:48 PM on April 11, 2001 [3 favorites]

The problem is "overloading them with services" usually entail loading the operating system. :-)

I wonder if my Windows machine would crash less if I sealed it up behind a wall. Sure, it sucks for usability but what can you do?
posted by fooljay at 11:53 AM on April 12, 2001