Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild In case the working week has given you bad vibrations, The Register devotes Friday mornings to a fresh instalment of On Call – our (hopefully) cathartic reader-contributed tales of tech support chores that left your peers shaken and stirred. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Don," who told us of his time in charge of …
Having acquired responsibility for a site in New Zealand one of the first things I did was sign off on a decent server rack - apparently the servers were just sitting on the concrete floor of the office, in a country that has been known to experience the occasional earth tremor!
In the distant past, I was involved in mounting electronics in aircraft. The electronics included tape drives, at least one thermionic valve in the ice-sounding radar and a hard copy device. The whole lot was fixed in a rack. The rack itself was mounted on shock mounts and the individual items were mounted on shock mountings on the rack. AFAIR (it was a long time ago!) the shock mounts were chosen with different properties - one lot to absorb landing shocks; the other to absorb vibration (this was a Twin Otter; the air mech on secondment from the RAF described it as "a bit agricultural"; it certainly vibrated!)
Many years ago I was on a Twin Otter fully loaded with fuel drums. We headed off on the great white expanse but we were too heavy to get off the ground. After 10 mins or so of very fast bouncing and probably skipping over many crevasses we finally limped into the air. It was the EPICA project at 2892m altitude which can't have helped. Apparently there is now a station there (Kohnen) but it my time it was in the middle of nowhere with a high snow accumulation rate.
They are a cheap, and who doesn't like tractor-feed paper? I use 'em for overnight error log printouts on equipment that has small buffers for that kind of thing (more common than you might think, even in this day and age). I also use 'em to print out source code listings ... Hang all the necessary printouts on the wall, and "connect the dots" (mentally, or with colo(u)red bits of string) to get a better idea of the big picture of somebody else's idea of flow. Handy when trouble-shooting, occasionally.
Yes, I'm an old fogey. Beats the alternative.
We still use them for weighbridge stuff, as when a lorry comes in, it goes over the bridge, a print out is generated, the lorry then empties/fills (depending on if it's landfill waste, or taking on product) and over the bridge again, same paper is fed back in to had the new info added.. and then the paper is separated: top copy goes with the driver, 2nd sheet to accounts (physical backup to the data sent directly into the account system) and 3rd copy goes into the weighbridge files. We could do this on 3 different pages, and get the driver to sign 3 times, but NCR is easier...
There's an ancient Epson still in use at work where it periodically prints a line or two of numbers. Some sort of monitoring, I'm not sure what. It prints lines on demand, doesn't try to buffer an entire page, doesn't time out and spit a mostly empty page, doesn't sulk if its toner is too low or its ink is too old or it can't chatter with the mothership...
...as long as the ribbon is some degree of inky and mostly intact and there's fanfold paper being fed into it, it just works and has done so for decades.
For a while I had an Okidata model 100 printer. It had a comb of 34 dot-matrix heads mounted on a shuttle. Each print head had a small area of responsibility, and the shuttle would move the comb (and consequently, all the heads) from side-to-side.
The printer would shake the entire table it was resting on, and could be heard and felt through the floor in the living room, even with the computer room door closed. And, it was loud.
It printed two pages per minute.
Not in the same league, but I used to have an HP all in one desk jet. It was missing the encoder strip for the printer, so when you powered it on, the printhead/cartridges will shoot across at full speed, hitting the other side of printer with a lound clunk. As it was also missing rubber feet, it would also move an inch or so. Repeat a few times before it errored out.
I only used it as a scanner - never as a printer, but it was fun to watch. Only got rid of as Windows wouldn't support it anymore.
I still have an OKI Microline dot matrix printer somewhere, wide version, too. However, I think it's only a parallel interface, so I'll need to get an expansion board if I ever resurrect it.
However, for proper thundering, I once had an ASR33 teletype in my bedroom. Everyone in the house knew when I was printing on that. None of this two pages a minute, it was probably closer to two lines per minute.
Nope and nope. Fractional T1s were sold in DS0 slices at 64Kbps, they were never sold in 56Kbps speeds, nor was ISDN, which was sold in 64Kbps and 128Kbps. Frame relay *was* sold at 56Kbps speeds but it wasn’t available commercially in the US until the very early 90s.
The original story has multiple nonsensical errors, like using AppleTalk over the WAN, which absolutely didn’t happen because it wasn’t a routed protocol. I guarantee the submitter said “56Kbps modem” because they didn’t know any better, just like they said AppleTalk. This story is pure fiction.
I would say the yarn is retold to the best of the reader's recollection. Some of the details in these sorts of stories get lost in the fog of time -- it's reminiscing rather than reporting.
Anyway, we can try to clarify a few things. I'll let the team know.
C.
They might be calling the connection box a "modem" out of reflex, or for want of a better word. For example, people call a DSL box a "modem", even though there is no modulation or demodulation involved, at least not in the traditional sense of how an actual modem works.
Please learn to read for content. The Switched 56 lines came in the decades BEFORE ISDN and F-T1. And trust me, $TELCO leased millions of Switched 56 lines.
"nonsensical errors, like using AppleTalk over the WAN, which absolutely didn’t happen because it wasn’t a routed protocol."
Who said anything about routing Appletalk? If one knew what one was doing, one could bridge Apple Talk networks. Gandalf (I think? Anyone?) made a box that allowed two Appletalk networks to be bridged over POTS. If you had the POTS lines, you could tie several locations together this way. I also saw several which were similarly bridged over faster lines. Seemed kinda pointless to me (TCP/IP was already fully functional), but people did it anyway. It fulfilled a need.
My memory of Gandalf was from the mid 1980s when it was the connectivity mechanism for tty hookup to the computers at University. It had a large number of ports, allowing multiple labs being able to multiplex connections to any of the lab servers - Unix, PDP, HP etc. Back then it was probably an uncommon requirement, but apparently someone from the computer department was wondering around a trade show (must have been rare at the time) at happened across something that could exactly fit their requirement and bought it on the spot.
Appletalk CAN be used for WANs. I worked at Apple in the early 90's and their Appletalk network was ALL over the place. From the US to Europe. They had routers everywhere. Of course, it only had two levels, and keeping track of everything took up a bunch of ethernet bandwidth (the reason for AppleTalk II), but it could be done! Quite interesting way to go.
A building I once worked in during the early 1990s had localtalk running over legacy rs232 serial cabling to Webster gateways then to a 10base5 (thicknet) TCP/IP backbone which in turn connected to the campus network via a 5 megabit broadband ethernet running over reused closed circuit coax (75ohm?)
Never really had to deal with the details as the appletalk and macs mostly just worked. The very few IBM PCs had localtalk isa cards. The departing admin said you don't have worry about appletalk - it will run over wet string. At the time I thought that is only network technology (wet string) that would improve its performance by being pissed on.
Appletalk appears to be the protocol and LocalTalk and EtherTalk the particular datalink but as I wrote I never had any grief from it so never took too much interest.
I remember the page-feed printers from way back when I was a wee operator. When someone launched a rather intensive print, they could end up visibly shaking from side to side as the print head moved along and swung violently back.
No wonder they were so heavy. If HP were making them today, they would literally shake themselves apart.
If it moved from side to side, I would suggest that it was a moving-head printer, probably dot matrix, but daisy wheel printers also moved the head, with the head moving left to right and then right to left. Some printers were clever enough to print the second line backwards on the right to left movement. Those that weren't moved the head back to the left very rapidly, which is often what caused the most vibration.
Proper line printers on the other hand, used either chain or band printing, with hammers at every print location (or sometimes every 2 for some cheaper chain/band printers), with a loop containing the characters constantly circling around very fast, and being violently hit at the right point to print a character through an ink ribbon, in a similar way that a mechanical typewriter worked, but much faster. These tended to not rock too much, unless the chain/band broke, whereupon they would violently shake once as the remains of the chain or belt hit the inside of the chassis, often denting it.
The risk of injury if that happened was a major reason why you never operated these printers with the covers open. The other was the noise, because 100+ hammers hitting the band ribbon and paper every line made one huge noise!
Digital LN06 was a dot matrix line printer - so a dot matrix head in every one of the 132 print positions (Might have been a fast moving head though - the little grey cells aren't as reliable as they once were)! Blisteringly fast and destroyed ribbons. Used it for printing all sorts of stuff - amazingly IIRC the interface worked over 3 wire serial (2,3,7) at 115Kbaud....
ICL line printers used a barrel, not a ribbon.
A colleague of mine had worked in a place with an ICL "shuffle" printer. This beast had 120 character lines as per usual, but only a 40 character barrel. It would apparently print the line by doing the first 40 characters, then a carriage mechanism would pull the barrel back and shift it 40 characters, then shift it forward and he next 40 characters would be printed, then it would do it all again for the final 40 characters.
Thing is, the barrel was quite massive, as was the carriage mechanism (British engineering, built to last), so inertia was a bit of a bugger.
My colleague (who was not prone to tall tales, though who knows?) said that when the payroll or general ledger was being run they would use three operators; one to enter the console commands and do the running-around necessary for the old GEORGE-powered machine, and two to steer the printer away from important bits of the machine room when it went walkabout and prevent it pulling its plug out of the socket.
True? Who knows, but it's a great image for the old brain on boring days.
Large format inkjet printers also shake like mad. In fact the stands are designed to absorb some of the momentum as the head changes direction at the end of each row, and the whole printer visibly moves sideways a few centimetres.
"isibly shaking from side to side as the print head moved along"
When I was a student computers were rare and botany departments certainly didn't have one. We did have an electric Marchant calculator where the entire register moved. Everything was OK until it came to doing division when the vibration would make it move along the desk.
My first electric typewriter was like that. I was used to a manual and returning the carriage in a nice smooth motion. Pressing RETURN and having the machine itself WHAM! across to the other side would make the whole thing leap across the desk.
Next to a company where I was working (late last century) was an empty plot of land that some council drone decided to slap a big blue COMMERCIAL zone on in their real-life Sim City. There was somet problems with the ground there that meant they had to anchor any new buildings quite far down, which meant long poles. Thankfully, they didn't use pile drivers[0] to do this, but rather some form of vibrating technique that propagated throughout the whole area as they were doing it for hours on end. That and some mention of coming controlled explosions triggered our management to demand that we put huge domed rubber bumpers on all loose computer equipment in our building. It took us the better part of three months to complete, and I still have nightmares about both the smell and the stickiness of the industrial strength double-sided tape we used to stick those bumpers on.
[0] Seriously, the sound of a pile driver echoing off a wall for hours on end is probably the worst sound in the world. DU-DUM DU-DUM DU-DUM DU-DUM...
My previous employers were metal bashers - a 1000t Stanko press running all day* could be really annoying given the noise and vibration caused.
*We weren't allowed to run it overnight due to noise complaints, despite the fact the industrial estate was there long before the housing right behind the factory.
Reminds me of a complaint when I was a Parish Council Chairman.
Some loud mouth from a City Bank had retied in his 40's (when us mere plebs will be working into our 80's) and had moved into the largest house in our village.
He had the gaul to actually come to the Parish Council Meeting to complain about:
(a) the 1870's vintage Church clock chiming 24 hours a day
(b) the sheep bleating in the fields (which they also do a little during the hours of darkness)
(c) the Cockrell breading unit which emanated all sorts of sounds and an amount of smell
I was more diplomatic than the farm owning Church Warden, who was also one of our longer standing PC members! He also suggested that he could move his manure heap much closer to the complainants house!
The countryside is a working area where salt-of-the-earth people are trying to scratch a living, not just a playground for city folk!
[Disclaimer: Ex-Deputy President of the National Federation of Young Farmers Clubs, but working at the forefront of technology, whilst embedded in my local community and doing voluntary and charity work - so not some swivel eyed loon!]
The western edge of the East Midlands.
If you played Assassins Creed Valhalla, you will already know the name.
Ubisoft made a small donation to the village, when they found out that there was a real village with the same name, in very nearly the same place as on their map.
Didn't seem too difficult even with google's dubious assistance and knowing nothing about computer games.
If I have the right location they weren't too keen on witches and might have been the inspiration for Agnes Nutter.
Swivel eyed loons add to life's rich tapestry although the merchant banker seems to have cornered this village's idiot market and was fortunate not to be composting in the Warden's muck heap.
Where I used to work, we had a fast Dot Matrix printer. I never got to measure it's speed, as I wasn't stricltly allowed to touch it, but this printer spat out paper at a rate of notes.
This printer was load enough that it had to used in a sound proof box, and the company had also set it up in it's own room, with no humans in there. In fact, it was painfully loud, as I found out when one of the technicians that maintained it overrode with cover detection switch and printed something with the cover open, while I was in the room..
My IBM 1403 does about 23 pages (~1400 lines) of 11X14 (132 columns) per minute. Can crank up to over 6 feet per second if the printout contains a lot of blank lines. It can empty a box of fan-fold faster than you can kill the print process. That's a joke (kinda), the print buffer is only 140 characters (of core), so killing the process, if you can, stops the printer pretty quickly. Yes, she'll spit out a lovely arc of paper if allowed. Not recommended .... folding it all back up is a pain in the butt, and it's getting expensive (if you can find it).
I don't have much use for her these days, mostly banner printing and old Fortran/COBOL code. I'm going to keep her around anyway, just for the shock value. The silly thing is LOUD at full-chat. If anyone is wondering, I keep her on rubber isolated feet, in a box made of two layers of 1 inch lead-foam with two inches of rock wool in between and a triple-glazed plexi window ... the neighbors are thankful.
They were rather impressive in the rate they ate fanfold/music rule paper.
Back in the day, I worked for a company that kept all the current listings for their various assembler and COBOL programs in a row of cabinets just outside the computer room in case of things going titsup.
I still have a few such things lurking in the attic when I was trying to understand the wonders of how IBM machines worked.
Haven't printed anything since about 1997. Don't need to now, but I do miss wondering into the machine room and tearing off a listing. Even with the hood down, they were loud. Very loud.
I distinctly remember a listing of the VSE/ESA supervisor that came up to my shoulder.
Place I worked at had field sites that used 900 line/minute Dataproducts drum printers. 3-copy greenbar carbon paper. They'd run them without the covers. The systems printed for a few seconds every minute. Most of the reports went right into 55-gallon plastic Rubbermaid trash cans parked behind the printers, but could be retrieved if required. There were a few pages that were used, printed as an event went off. They were pulled off and handed to the customer. The system printed longer reports at end-of-day. The covers might be closed then. Many of the operators seemed partially deaf from exposure to the noise from the open printers.
Each site had a decollator (remember those?) to separate the pages and the carbons.
My employer had been quite loyal to Dataproducts, but when they switched from towel ribbons to cartridge ribbons, the latter proved unreliable. So when the Centronics salesman showed up one day, and he had (formerly CDC) band printers with towel ribbons in his catalog, we jumped on that.
Our next-generation systems used laser printers.
"and the card reader / punch (I forget its model number). "
Given it was probably donated to your high school, I'd guess it was an old, slow 1402. Might have been a more modern 2540.
"There was a program that would play music on the 1403."
The program is rather imaginatively named "music". You also need to have a "data" deck for the individual tune. There were also "frequencies" decks for various purposes such as defining the print line for the individual notes in each song, frequency sweeps, etc. (Source: My card box labeled "music".) Rumo(u)r had it that playing music could destroy the machine, but I never saw one die from it. On the other hand, I don't run that code anymore ... parts for a 1403 are getting hard to find, and can be rather spendy. On the gripping hand, the Techworks! museum in Rochester, NY figured out how to rebuild the chains a while back, and that is the part usually cited as being the vulnerable point, so ...
Caveat Auditor
We had a 180 columns sized dot-matrix printer, epson LQ 1070+ something. We used it as a benchmark for the sturdiness and wobbleness of the tables.
"If it can handle the printer, it can handle anything" one of the guys commented. Indeed, the tables that passed were fit to a) climb on, or b) hold a 100 lb. 21" chonker CRT monitor or maybe c) work on a v8 block.
We later got one tailored table - with spaced planks to pass continuous feed paper - reinforced for that specific purpose. I managed to keep the table, use it to this day to keep an UPS and 2 car batteries.
Beautiful version of that in a 'Goodness Gracious Me' sketch, with an Indian company and their new hire, a white guy. They ask the new boy his name (Steve), all have trouble pronouncing it and give him an Indian one.
(just reminded me I worked with an Indian guy everyone called Fred. Someone asked me his real name... I struggled, finally remembering it was actually Kishore)
One person I worked with (from Thailand I think) had to order his [well-known Texas corporation] cubicle nameplate 3 times before they finally got it right. I looked at his first order form, and of course, it was easily read block print, with his name spelled the way he wanted it.
Sometimes having an in-house name-plate department isn't such a good idea after all.
There's an infamous video demo on YT somewhere, a guy is monitoring a huge HDD RAID and sets up a live graph of error rates. He goes over and YELLS into the RAID rack and the error rate goes sky high! It settles back down and everything is (mostly) fine, but the error rate is still nonzero. Hey might be a good idea generally to keep sound levels down in the server room.
> one failed disk per month
That is a lot! This means the MGTBF (Maximum Guaranteed Time Between Failures) was three years! That is unusual to be this bad. Either the drives were a bad series or the system they were used in is bad for drives, for example bad ventilation, too much vibration...
A college friend was granted the use of a small lab in one of the college's buildings. He had a vibration-sensitive experiment he was trying to set up. You'd think that a basement lab would be fine there, but no - the building was across a narrow road from the railroad tracks!
So he went and bought a pack of condoms. He filled 4 with sand and put them on the corners of his work table, put a sheet of plywood on those, filled 4 more with water, put them on the plywood corners, put another sheet of plywood on top, then topped the lot with a couple bricks. Between the sand, water, and extra mass, it damped out a wide range of vibration frequencies.
To this day he remains the only person I've ever known that bought condoms for research purposes.
We installed a machine which was indirectly causing irritating noise to local dwellings. I say local but outside the industrial area of the factory. Despite the machine being well within accepted standards and expensive analysis, we put the machine on super-special anti-vibration mounts. The machine vibration was consequently almost undetectable. Result outside: No change. The building structure was in perfect resonance with the machine. It was later found that the building was built on an older structure which had a large hollow underneath acting as a sort of echo chamber. The customer bought the affected houses.
In the 1990s I was at a college for the blind and they used (among other things) a Braille embosser, which was basically a dot matrix printer that hit the page so hard it made bumps in it.
It also vibrated the desk so badly that chips came loose from motherboards, until we got it mounted on another table suitably far away from its controlling PC.
I once worked at a place that had one of those to accommodate a blind programmer. The Braille printer appeared to be based on a daisywheel printer. It had a single stylus and embossed the dots into fanfold tractor-feed card stock. It was loud, even with its accoustical enclosure's cover closed.
How long ago was this? The Wikipedia article confirms my memory that Apple finally discontinued the last vestiges of the "Server" version of MacOS (and, by implication, any remaining attempt to sell the Mac as a server machine) a couple of years ago. And I get the impression that they hadn't been trying- and hence taken- too seriously for many years before that.
From the point of view of commercial rivalry, it'd probably have still looked better if they'd used Linux or BSD-based servers instead of Windows, though.
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