Servers Hated Mondays Until Techie Quit Quaffing Coffee In Their Company

On Call Mornings are hard, and Friday mornings doubly so. Which is why The Register gives readers a little kick along on the last day of the working week in the form of a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support treachery and triumph.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mark" who told us of his time implementing Unix systems in a manufacturing business that sprawled across two sites in the Welsh valleys – a picturesque part of the world but also a locale that can become unpleasantly chilly in winter.

This story took place in the 1980s, a time before 24/7 connectivity. The business where Mark installed the Unix boxes therefore shut down the machines for the weekend.

Mark is a diligent chap who often came to work early, and on Mondays tried to arrive before 0700 to switch on the servers so they'd be ready for the working day.

The machines were reliable by the standards of the day, but once winter rolled around they slowed dramatically.

"They refused to boot immediately," Mark told On Call. "Drive lights were inactive. I would sit there, puzzled and shivering in front of a tiny fan heater waiting for the main office heating to come on after the weekend shutdown."

"My teeth were chattering while I fretted and drank coffee," he added.

The servers would eventually boot – but only after workers arrived for duty.

"Staff were getting tetchy about the systems being down every Monday," Mark told On Call. And he was the subject of their tetchiness. As winter deepened, the Monday morning outages persisted, and the staff became tetchier.

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Mark eventually solved the problem.

"One Monday I placed the fan heater in front of the servers before I did anything else, and after five minutes or so they booted without a problem," Mark told On Call.

Without the heaters, Mark was a little cold, but the warm glow of fixing the problem – and avoiding tetchy users – made up for the short period of shivering.

"My guess was that backplanes could not tolerate low temperatures," he suggested.

Has cold, heat, or other adverse weather complicated your tech support efforts? Let us know about your climate-defying feats by clicking here to send On Call an email so we can warm readers' hearts by telling your story on a future Friday. ®