Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry Welcome once again to Who Me?, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which IT pros share stories of times their work spun off into eccentric orbits and they (mostly) brought them back for soft landings. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Alf" who once worked on a team that tended Windows NT on thousands …
This continued to produce blocks well after the people involved had left the university, essentially until all of the machines were rebuilt. You can even tell when a whole computer lab was rebuilt/upgraded.
https://stats.distributed.net/participant/psummary.php?project_id=205&id=281848
Perhaps not as noble but I do remember the odd shout from the CTO along the lines of "guys, please limit your torrents for the next few hours, we've got a client in and we need them to see the release go through" in the early days of my career when office bandwidth tended to outstrip home bandwidth.
I disagree, somewhat.
The mistake was in implementing the plan on his own. What he should have done would be to present the idea to his manager and get approval.
Of course, that meant his idea could also have been shot down, but hey, them's the breaks.
Disclaimer : I was a long-time contributor to SETI@Home myself, and ran it on every computer I had at home, plus my work laptop if I could.
I've always been of the belief that anyone who follows the creed "It's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission", is not someone I want to be working with.
Something that might seem like an easy, no harm install, could easily cause massive problems that the installer knows nothing about - from a security point of view, from compliance, from legal or regulatory points of view. How often have we all had meetings where someone says, "Well what if we just install this to solve the problem..." followed by someone else shouting "Noooo...." and then explaining how that would cause much MUCH bigger problems.
Asking permission, might see your idea shot down, but asking for forgiveness, might see your career shot down...
"Disclaimer : I was a long-time contributor to SETI@Home myself, and ran it on every computer I had at home, plus my work laptop if I could."
I also ran it with my puny AMD K6-2 back then - without the graphical screensaver because the graphics slowed down computation measurably.
Anyway, for some time my job consisted of putting together PC's and I used my SETI@Home account for some CPU stress testing back in the day.
The it all went BOINC and I lost all my interest.
In a former job, one of my colleagues wanted to play that game of getting on the leaderboard so set up SETI@home on all of the office computers.
I left a hardware simulator running overnight. It was only supposed to take about 5 hours, so I could pick up the results and start work first thing the next day.
It eventually took about 17 hours, and so messed up a day's work plan. Not such an invisible cost.
I requested they be removed from every machine except at most, his.
Obviously this was in the days of a more liberal security & management policy.
See title.
Hazy recollections are that it was supposed to be the screen saver. Presumably, it was activating on lack of keystrokes/mouse interaction, which was the state when running a simulator (Win95/Win2k era).
My main point was that feeding someone's "home office" vanity was costing me and my firm time and money. (and creating extra work/distraction to get it removed).
I used PHP Seti@Home Monitor, which worked like a man-in-the-middle to download batches of work packets and serve them to your cluster of local machines. It let you manage packets before they were worked on, I think it even let you chuck packets that would take longer than others to process, so you could get just that little bit ahead of competitors. Also, you could display a star chart that showed the direction each packet was recorded from.
The people doing the punishing weren't aware of any good deed, and there wasn't any benefit to them or to the business. They had every reason to question whether their production systems were going to be hit by something. I'll also note that they didn't punish anybody. No good deed and no punishment makes your statement a bit difficult to understand.
... if we are a certain age.
I did exactly the same, we had a ton of rack servers that outside of biz hours did bugger all, but otherwise were SQL clusters, or webservers behind F5
These were obviously all set up and worked swimmingly until the clocks changed, and something went t*tsup and comms went down
Cue immediate need to investigate the issue.
Now I had a gut feeling what it was, it was, and removed trace of it.
Excuse given?
There was a known issue between Broadcom network adapters and HP Procurve switches when auto-negotiate was relied on, where comms would fail and infra refused to set the TX speed manually despite this.
I recommended they be set properly and the issue went away... Infra successfully blamed, my bullet dodged.
Still awaiting comms from E.T.
At least modern PCs / Servers when the CPU is idle they are using less power. Give them a heavy load then the power consumption goes up. So it's not actually "free" to give them something like seti@home to do. Also generates more heat therefore the cooling system has to work harder also drawing more power.
So in effect it's stealing to use the "idle" computers in this way.
We've had incidents where I work of people mining bitcoins using the organisation's electricity.
The trick is to do it in winter.
Since heating electrically is 100% efficient (or near enough, I guess some might get wasted as noise or blinkenlight), it would be 'free'- in the sense that you spend as much electricity using a 1000W server rack as a heater as you would from a 1000W heater, and get the same thermal output.
I've heard of offices, back in the glory days of on-prem servers, heating swimming pools with 'waste' heat from the CPUs. It's only a waste if you don't find a use for it.
Good point, I'd forgotten about heatpumps somehow! They are indeed even more 'efficient' than using heating elements - able to move more heat for a given wattage than you could produce. That does rather put a dent in the scheme.
(for anyone worried about breaking the laws of thermodynamics - the trick is that you have to consider the whole system. Ultimately, the heat you get out of HVAC is produced by the sun outside your building, and then you move it indoors by trickery, rather than trying to make it indoors directly by heating a wire)
I agree with finding a use for waste heat that you're going to generate anyway (swimming pool, etc.) but the problem with saying that during Winter a 1000W server rack costs the same as a 1000W heater is when you wouldn't use a 1000W electrical heater but the equivalent output from a gas central heating system.
But these days it would probably be cheaper to buy nice warm jumpers and not turn the heating up.
----------> Starting to miss the cold more and more!
EDIT: Beaten to it by the original and one and only AC!!!
So when the AC above goes AC do we get a recursion error?
I think right now a 1000W electric heater would be cheaper than the equivalent gas burner! Something about there being a war on.
Normally gas heating is indeed cheaper than electric, and as as AC pointed out, heat-pump based stuff like HVAC is cheaper than either.
You might think that, but for political reasons*, the unit price of electricity is tied to the most expensive generating source, so when the price of natural gas sky-rockets, so does the price of electricity. I believe the price per KWh for 'leccy is still higher than gas (apparently currently 34p vs 10.3p), although the gas price might be higher than what the 'leccy used to be before extreme capitalism took hold.
*As far as I can tell, those political reasons appear to involve brown envelopes and record profits for producers.
The downside to a central heating system is that you're generally heating a whole house. Sometimes (eg. if you're working from home) it's more efficient to just heat one room.
This winter I've found a better option than a fan heater, an electric foot warmer. It draws 25W max, but keeps me feeling nice and warm, which would take a lot more gas/leccy than if I was trying to heat the whole room.
All these people who've followed the TV make-over fad for removing all their internal walls are going to be cursing when they realise they have to heat the entire house in order to heat any of the house. When working from home I ensconce myself in my bedroom office with curtain over the door, and after the morning heating turns off the waste heat from the computer keeps things ticking over.
Coat, as that's what I put on to venture to the kitchen for the kettle. :)
For a while I loved SETI and ran it on my (then powerful) home PC. All the time. But then I noticed that the fans kept running. Hmmm. I put a watt meter on the PC, and sure enough, it used a lot more power running SETI in the background. Looking at my power bill - this is at home, not work - I figured it was about $200 a year.
So I was donating $200 a year out of my pocket to SETI. So I killed it. Quiet fans...
Doing it in winter is only beneficial if all of the following is true:
1. The place where the computer is generating heat would be heated to that level anyway (possibly not at night).
2. The electricity powering the computer is cheaper or the same cost as the way the room would be heated.
3. The same is true for any other systems involved, for example the networking systems that would also heat up if the task involves a lot of data transfer.
4. There are no other limited resources that are consumed (for instance a data cap on the network).
In most cases, cryptocurrency mining for heat production is not the most efficient method to do it unless the crypto is worth a lot to you.
Where I worked, I had a Seti@home client set up for out of hours work. I got rid of it because our IT department noticed, and banned it, stating that if we were going to support any projects like that, the company would do so officially, and set aside equipment for the task. They were mainly concerned about us running unauthorised code, and also they tended to run maintenance tasks overnight, so wanted a light load on the network, so as not to slow them down.
At least modern PCs / Servers when the CPU is idle they are using less power. Give them a heavy load then the power consumption goes up. So it's not actually "free" to give them something like seti@home to do. Also generates more heat therefore the cooling system has to work harder also drawing more power.
I'm totally surprised that the bean counters didn't notice the electric bills suddenly got higher and start an inquiry. Those folks seem to or should notice any increases in costs of just about everthing.
We had some idiot go round installing SETI@Home on every Windows machine they could get access too. Turned out to be a contractor who used the simple expedient of asking a user what their password was, then logging in once they left for the day. My manager was an ex-army officer, and the bollocking he gave the contractor before dismissing him could be heard from the other side of the building.
PS - Only did ran it on my PC, no others. The PC I had was an old HP Workstation with TWO CPU's (not cores, two phyiscal chips), so that beast was just twiddling it's thumbs)
Now you mentioned the World Community Grid, does sound familiar, think I did that instead of BOINC. Whatever it was, suddenly stopped working, stongly suspected that was due to new security measures, so took the hint and removed the client and never spoke of it again!
I did similar at the university where I used to work, although I used the screensaver client, not the always-running client, so it generally didn't cause any problems like ALF ran into. I put it in the Ghost image that we used on the Dell GX1's in our computer labs. It took those 233 MHz PII's a few hours to grind through each packet (or whatever it was called), but they were far faster than the 486's and Pentiums I was running it on at home, and there were 50 of them. I did manage to crack the Top 500 for EDU (maybe even the Top 100) before all was said and done.
AFAIK, we never did find E.T, though.
Yeah. I didn't get in trouble at work, but the wife was PISSED one month when the power bill came in and was $75 more than usual. I had gotten up to about 20 or 30 various 486/pentium motherboards and power supplies strung up in the crawl space under the kitchen, all dangling from wires tied to nails and screws I'd put in the joists. Pfft, we don't need no fancy computer cases to look for aliens. All running Linux and the SETI client 24/7. She was not amused in the slightest and I spent a good week in the doghouse for that stunt. So I cut down to my 5 fastest mobos and took the rest to work and found a spot to run most of them there.
Things were simpler then. Good times indeed.
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Early 2000s I was working on a satellite office of a corporation. We had plenty of lab servers and PCs only used approx 10 mins a day each, each having a particular version of our software being tested.
So, Me and my boss ran Seti@Home on all servers and workstations overnight. No one cared about heating/electricity costs. We ranked up rapidly in the UK lists at least, definitely into the first 100, but we didn't expend it to the whole company... I even had an SSI cluster of Seti@Home at some point, the PCs would reboot to the CD overnight and at 8AM they would reboot back to WinNT / Win2k / Linux.
A gaggle of us at one workplace got into the whole SETI thing for a bit,easy enough since we had full access on our workstations.
There was a Windows admin guy who started to get persnickety about it, not there was a policy against it. He was well-meaning enough, but not too bright.
One of our more creative engineer-types came up with the idea that running the SETI client was actually beneficial for the hardware longevity, because it reduced the physical expansion and contraction in the CPU due to thermal cycling. Brilliant!
Before SETI there was the RC5 cracking challenge by distributed.net which I had been taking part in for a while, when I decided like Alf, to boost my rankings I'd co-op a dozen of the Pentium 90 and 133 industrial PC systems which were sitting idle at the back of the lab. There was no direct internet access on the network in those days, with a single PC being available for anyone which needed to access the internet to transfer files from, so I knocked up a script to copy results and new block files between the shared machine and the RC5 crackers. It worked so well I forgot all about it and a year later left the company, it wasn't until 6 months after I had gone someone must have noticed them and switched it all off.
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