beep! *wait 30 seconds* beep!

[margaretc.livejournal.com]

May I just say that having too many devices that beep is going to drive me absolutely bananas real soon now. I was in our shiny new server room this morning and I kept hearing a beep from the rack, which was behind me. I looked in the rack, and two of the servers, one Dell 1950 and 1 Dell 2950, have blinking main LED indicators. I looked in our monitoring software, I poked around on the machines themselves, and I sent out an email mentioning the unexplained beeping and the blinking LEDs. I finished what I was doing and walked out the door. As I was locking the door, I heard the beep again, in the hallway. So I stood around like an idiot waiting to hear it again - longest 30 seconds of my week, I tell you. One professor walked by while I was just standing there listening to nothing, and she gave me the oddest look as she walked by. Turns out my pager had gone off while I was elbow-deep in the rack, and now it was beeping to tell me that I hadn't looked at its message.
Stupid pager.

Doesn't change the fact that two servers have blinking indicator lights, though, so at least it made me look at them.

Comments

[falnfenix]

oh god, i hate the missed-message pager beep. it's woken me from a sound sleep before...and let me tell you, trying to find the beeping when barely awake is nigh impossible.

i almost miss being with the servers, though - that kept me off the phone.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of something I did back during my university days. Imagine a room full of VAX10's, cooling gear, winchester drives, printers and assorted network stuff...
all of which goes beep, whirr, ka-chunnk, etc etc...

Now, the Dean of computer sciences was new, and very, very keen on.. ah.. "asserting his authority" if you catch my drift.

So, at my suggestion, myself and a couple of other techs had spent the weekend playing with the tech, writing a program that when it run would trigger bits of the equipment, remotely from the terminal room wa-aa-ay across campus, and when no other tech's were in.

Net result: When the Dean walked in that monday, the computers all started chugging way, revv-ing the fans, printing pattens and doing other things, such that the combined noise modulated into recognizable music, specifically;
The Imperial March from Star Wars, aka Darth Vaders theme.

Of course we had a camera set up..his expression was priceless!

[rit-emt.livejournal.com]

That...is awesome.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Inspired by the teletype printer program that used to play Handels Ode to Joy, or something...

I think at one point every comp.sci student had a copy of the VHS tape.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

gah.. DEC10's & VAX mainframes...stupid fingers,

[jecook]

*hands you 500 gold coins and a One-Up*

This comment is made of Win.

[canray.livejournal.com]

500 Gold Coins = 5 1-Ups!!! :-D

[jecook]

The bad of Goodness only had a single One-Up in it, unfortunatly.

[jecook]

er, BAG of goodness.

*needs more sleep*

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

If there is video, you should put it up on the youtubes. Inquiring minds want to see!

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

Just read that it's a VHS. Hm.

Sounds like it would be a great entry to some 'funniest video' contest.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

You know... I'd be surprised if one of them hadn't done that. Although if they had, I never heard.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Dude... cheap VHS cassette from back in the 80's! I don't think I even own a copy anymore, much less in a readable condition. [IIRC my copy died and was trashed sometime just before the millennium].

I guess I could ask around, I think I have some addy's that might still be valid. Someone might have copied it to DVD.

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

A much loved VHS cassette, no?

Don't trouble yourself over it too much for a random person on the intertubes. That sounds like it would totally freaking awesome to watch, though.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Much loved, and much re-watched, yes..
You're right though, it would have been cool to share the joy! The look of bafflement as he noticed the computers were acting weird, the slow dawn of reluctant comprehension as he worked out what he was hearing, followed by baffled rage and humiliation as he realised there was no-one there doing it!

Mind you, we only had to hum a few bars for him to twitch slightly, for days afterwards...not that he could outright accuse us, since it wasn't that long after the film came out.

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

I'm giggling just thinking about it. Hee~ ♥

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Funniest bit was him making throttling motions as he stood there looking at the computers...
he looked like he was trying to Force-choke the mainframe!

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

Ahahaahaha~ Oh, that's beautiful. He must've been imagining how he'd strangle the person who set it up to do that.

How many hours did it take, by the way?

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Most of Saturday afternoon and almost all of Sunday... writing the batch files was the easy part, it was tweaking and tuning that took the longest time. Imagine trying to work out what sort of data file you had to write to an empty sector, to get the winchester drive to play a middle C note?!

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

Wow. That must've been an entertaining weekend, at least!

Did the video pick up on the sound?

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

It did that, we...ah.. "liberated" the camera and microphones from the media studies building.

And yeah, fun times... lots of giggles and a hell of a lot of pizza and soda!

Funnest bit was discovering that if you turned up the pump pressure on the liquid cooling circuit, down-revved the fans by forcing the mainframe to idle... then suddenly loaded the cpu to maximum, turning up the heat and thereby revving up the fans...and finally dropped the water pressure in the liquid cooling part of the system... you could basically make the mainframe blow a very loud and juicy raspberry !!

Didn't use that in the end... but at oh-god early on a Sunday, that was hilarious!

[zendequervain.livejournal.com]

Raspberry, huh? AWESOME.

I'm so envious of that awesomeness.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

*grins*

well, it was rather silly at times too...buncha techs all sitting around, giggling like schoolboys and making the central mainframe make rude noises!