A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong? As a fresh working week commences, The Register understands that many readers may feel like giving the kit they tend to a good thump. Which is why each week we offer a fresh and hopefully cathartic instalment of Who, Me? so you can take heart from fellow readers' tales of tech support agonies rather than letting irritation …
In the early days of the IBM PC, we would have some adapter cards - or even motherboards - with intermittent problems. Send the box to the CE team for repairs, and it would come back with no fault found. (We even got into the habit of putting drops of tippex on cards so we could tell whether they'd actually been replaced.) Scraping a screwdriver across some of the circuit tracks would turn an intermittent into a permanent failure. And replacement parts then arrived.
I remember getting a bunch of new workstations for some computational chemists; one by one, the graphics cards would fail and would be replaced under warranty. I suggested to the vendor that maybe replacing all the the remaining cards would save both them and us time - they said no. So over the next few months the remaining cards failed...
I had a similar experience with a machine provided by a digital company somewhere Pacific. They provided it with 20 HDDs, which I was happy with because I could increase redundancy. Unfortunately, as I discovered sex months later, when I looked closely after a disk failed, the hardware was all 10 years old. I wanted them to replace all the drives with new, but they would only replace one with a cheery offer to replace more as and if they failed. They put it another years-old drive Six months later, 5 more died on the same night. ZFS so it managed, but I told them I reserved the right to reject replacements that were too old. During the excessive time that it took them to find more, all of the rest of the drives failed. ZFS is good but it's not miraculous, so, having lost all of my data, I transferred all five of my servers to their competitors and cancelled my account. The replacement ZFS server was also not new but the SSDs they installed were.
I used to maintain some x-ray machines for a client that had sold them to HMRC (Now borderforce). The systems had 2 PCs, Windows 98 to talk to the Xray system, and XP to control/display it.
Both machines came with samsung HDs. 1 in the 98 machine, 2 in the XP.
When they failed, we'd get a replacement. It's only after the 4th failure I started to log the drive details - the replacements were from the same batch the failed ones were. I can only assume the builder ordered a job lot, and was slowly going thought them for new builds and replacements.
I stopped sending them back and replaced them at the client's expense with new ones. The money saved on call outs/etc paid for the replacement drives easily.
... but the SSDs they installed were
For SSDs, new could be the right answer, but ...
There is a common problem with new RAID arrays - they are generally build with new drives, all the same model, bought at the same time, from the same supplier, and probably from the same manufacturing batch. They are then put into a box and powered on for the same time, running almost identical workloads. So if there is anything wrong with the batch, and/or there is a lifetime related issues, you lose the "a second failure is statistically unlikely before the first has been replaced" safety net - i.e. there is a much higher than most people would like probability of an array failure that loses all your data.
I'm no longer involved with that sort of thing with a work hat on, but for home I've been buying refurbished drives - nice 6TB ones from a manufacturer with a good reputation. But I've been buying them a few months apart so they come from different batches into my supplier. OK, the real reason for doing that is that I don't have the cash to buy several in one go, but this way they are coming with different runtimes on them, and I figure that any early failures will have been at the original data centre they will have come from. Over time I've been building up the size of one array, and swapping other smaller drives out where I need more space.
Yeah, it's a thing.
I once had a coil on sparkplug pack crap out on my car, trip to local VW specialist crapped out pack replaced, few weeks later same again, switch coilpack to a different plug misfire moves. Back to the local specialist who also had a vast stock of VW electrical parts ask for the box of used spares carefully select 4 coilpacks with different manufacture dates and from different factories as VW thoughtfully printed this info on the top ;-)
Had the motor for a few more years after that...
When I worked in a small computer shop in the early 90's we had a customer who bought a 486 DX/50 machine just after they were released. As these were so new we had to try four or five motherboards from different manufacturers before the machine would run correctly - at that time it was difficult to get motherboards that were stable running the processor at that frequency. If memory serves we only made that one, but we sold quite a few AMD 486 DX/40 machines as they were quite a bit cheaper.
As for percussive maintenance, we bought a batch of ten Samsung 170Mb HDD's when they were first released and my boss said to test one of them to see how good they were as we'd been using their 60Mb and 120Mb ones and the platters would start to degrade within a couple years and the discs would become unusable so we'd had to replace quite a few of them - the model number SHD3062A is etched into my brain because of this. I connected the first disk up and it spun up but there was no head actuator sounds so I tried tapping the side of the disk with a screwdriver quite firmly a few times to no effect. As the disk was outside my test rig I positioned it on its side then picked it up and then slammed it down onto the workbench which did the trick and unstuck the actuator. I ran my tests and the disks seemed ok, but we only ever had those ten 170Mb Samsung disks and instead started using IBM 170Mb disks which were quieter and very, very reliable.
Had that with an IBM disk in an SGI Indigo.
I was on the phone to the engineer and he told me to take out the disk and bang it on the desk. I did, and he told me I hadn't hit it hard enough - he wanted to HEAR the disk hit the desk. So I did it again, put a dent in the desk, and he said "That was fine - try it now". Bugger me if the disk didn't start working....
Also had a colleague who went to pull out a card from a powered-on system - just managed to shout "NO!" in time to stop that from happening.
I observed my software engineer officemate working on his Compaq 4/66 pizza-box PC. I stepped over, saw the cover partially-removed, saw glow of the green power-is-on LED, saw him with one hand on a memory stick, and sharply said, "That's not hot-swap RAM!"
Too late.
So I did it again, put a dent in the desk, and he said "That was fine - try it now". Bugger me if the disk didn't start working....
Quantum 105MB SCSI drives that came with early SPARCstations were notorious for that. If the box wouldn't boot after a powerdown the "cure" was to lift the front up 4" or so, and let it drop it back onto the desk. It usually booted then, but we learned to specify the 200MB drives...
Trying to sell a new model of an x86 blade chassis avant-la-lettre by highlighting the new feature of a toggle switch next to each compute card that powered down the card allowing it to hot swap without powering down the whole chassis.
Long term customer using the old models went very silent for an uncomfortably long time and then said sheepishly 'does that mean they weren't hot swap before?'
Anon to protect the guilty.
I bought a DX 3/100 and mobo in the mid 90's, mail order. Set the jumpers as per the board's silk screen print matrix of options and ... nothing. Returned them, got sent a new CPU and different, newer board and ... nothing. Rang the shop's help line and they advised me to cross-check the silk screen matrix with the paper manual (RTFM, but friendlier). Sure enough, there was a difference. Used the manual's setting and ... voom (well, mid 90's version of voom).
I'm not sure if there was an error in the silk screen or if the settings did actually change between board production and CPU manufacture. Two boards wrong makes me suspect the latter.
I used to work on 19" CRT monitors in the late 80s. They used caps that were the size of small drink cans, and weren't soldered in, but screwed in.
Anyway, was told to change one, but I decided to go by the silk screen + symbol, not the one scratched into the PCB.
A lot of magic smoke escaped that day!!
"I positioned it on its side then picked it up and then slammed it down onto the workbench which did the trick and unstuck the actuator"
Long ago, I was asked to look at a misbehaving PC by a panicked PhD student, whose only copy of her thesis was on the PC. Backups? Nah.
The PC was old, even by the standards of the day (early 2000s), and as far as I could see the HDD was dead - no motor sounds, nothing. I warned her to prepare for the worst, and brought the machine in to take a further look at.
I took the HDD out and had it propped up on the side of the case. The box still wasn't booting, but I reached over the case and accidentally knocked the HDD off. It hit the desk, sprang to life and the box booted, albeit with some very unhealthy sounds from the disk.
I was able to ram in a floppy disk and grab a copy of her thesis and a few other files, making her a very lucky student. Percussive maintenance definitely has its uses!
When I was at school, we had a network of BBC Bs (initially E-Net and then 'upgraded' to Econet). There was one machine (2C if I remember correctly!) that would never turn on correctly in the morning. On initial power up, rather than being greeted with the iconic dual beep of the BBC Micro, instead the first tone would go on forever. If whilst the first beep was sounding continuously you lifted the front of the machine by around two inches and let it drop, the second beep would then sound and the machine would work perfectly.
You could switch it on and off as many times as you wanted and it would run all day perfectly. However, the following morning when it had been off overnight it would need percussive maintenance again to get beyond the first startup beep. It worked like that for years right up until the day I left school. Now and then I do wonder if it was ever fixed or if it was simply retired when the BBCs were replaced with (probably) PCs.
Waaaaaay back inthe day - mid 80's - I was working for a county council that bought a load of 'Future' Computers (for anyone who remembers, they were FX-10/15/20/25/30/31/50's). They had a known issue with the RAM card. Occasionally you'd power the machine on, it'd go "beep beep" and display the words "RAM Parity Error" on the screen. First few times we'd call an engineer out who'd take the cover off, take the RAM card out, blow some spray-can air over all the connectors, put it back together, and presto! all fine. Until the next time. After a while, they wouldn't take them all apart, just lift the right side of the machine off the desk about 2 or 3 inches and let go. The idea was it'd re-seat the card and off to go and 99 times out of 100 it worked like a charm.
Back in the days when 40MB was big, I recall we saw some disks (Rodime ?) which had a sticktion problem. Found that a smart tap on a corner (so as to use angular momentum to turn the disk relative to the case when the case moved) would unstick the spindle and it would spin up.
Seen it many times in other areas of engineering - something won't run up, but if you give it a "bit of help" it will. And a quick test if the start cap has failed on an induction motor - in true "don't try this at home" fashion, wind a bit of string round the shaft, pull it hard to spin the rotor, then switch it on (the order of the last two steps being VERY important if you are fond of having all your fingers).
I recall an old 68030 machine at a friend's company developing an intermittent fault that was extremely hard to pin down. Ultimately, it turned out that when the machine ran hotter, the motherboard expanded a little, causing it to warp slightly. If it became convex as seen from the top, things kept working. If for some reason it turned concave, it failed. A tiny track on rear of the motherboard had a little fault, and in convex configuration the little gap remained closed, but in concave configuration it opened up. A quick solder fixed that, and the machine kept humming along nicely.
Been there, done that. Only in my case it was on industrial kit which had a hairline crack in a bit of track that caused it to fail every Monday morning, but after much thumping and switching off and on by the operators would spark into life, and was then good for the entire week (it wasn't run on weekends).
Had a site visit donkeys years since upon - pre PC days, in fact. The client, a research bit of a major oil company, had an ISC3651 colour desktop computer. 8080 based, with a staggering 16k of plug in ROM for the operating system on the A3 sized mainboard and a 50 way parallel expansion port on the back, which we'd plugged into our interface.
This is a similar beast: https://vintagecomputer.ca/intecolor-3600-series-computer/
Client had been complaining of random crashing and muggins was sent up to have a firkle.
Disconnected the expansion cable and extracted the mainboard. Had a close look and no obvious issues. Maybe it was one of the myriad connectors. Reassembled the machine, tested and crash. Rinse and repeat several times, increasing the scope of connector unplugging/reseating.
Crash, crash, crash.
After the umpteenth time I had just reassembled and was powering up when I realised I'd forgot the expansion cable. I reached across the top of the machine to plug it in (ok to do live). As I leant on the top of the case - crash. Lift off hand - back to life. Repeat with the same outcome.
Interesting.
Pulled mainboard again and got a magnifier. Started scrutinizing the board with a really intense scrute.
Found one data pin in one of the plugin ROM holders had never ever been soldered. The pin was just pressed against the side of the plated thru hole
30 seconds with a soldering iron and it was fixed.
And that thing had been running an engine test bed for 2 years like that.
Yup. Never, ever in the entire history of the universe. As dry an something very dry that's spent a week strapped to the north end of a southbound vulture flying across a very dry desert in an unusually intense dry season. With no rain.
I just mentioned a capacitor story! That was an Intecolor terminal too!
We're you in the UK? The company I worked for imported them from the US.
The other thing was that they used the cheapest possible IC sockets which became faulty, so often replace them too
> had never ever been soldered.
Not new. In the 1980s I acquired a 1970s audio power amplifier. Monster 300 Watt beast. All tubes/valves. A rack of these had run a decade 23/6 in a movie-film production operation running 60Hz film transports at 59.94Hz for, reasons. Caught fire; on the 10th floor in NYC. Boss wanted them out! Autopsy showed one pin had been crimped but never soldered. Worked out as 150 watts of fully burned-in PA power for clubs and even concerts in the park.
Not a professional amplifier, but about 20 years ago, a colleague knew I was handy with audio equipment and asked me to look at a 20+ year old Pioneer stereo receiver that had developed a hum when the phonograph input was selected. I took a look and found that, in order to route the audio from the phono preamp to the main portion of the amp, the designers chose to run shielded audio cable across the board instead of running it through the PCB traces (probably to help reduce noise and hum pickup from other circuits).
I found on one end where the signal lead of one of the two channels was supposed to be soldered to a PCB pad, that the wire itself just had a solder ball and only mechanically (and electrically) contacted the plated through hole that formed the pad. The pad appeared to have solder mask over it as well. Some how it worked for all those years but didn't survive a recent move. Scraping off the solder mask and resoldering the wire to the pad made it as good as (actually, better than) new.
When my oldest was very young, getting on for 40 years ago (jeez,,now I feel old), we spent some time digging out for a pond and he arrived to "help". All went well until we hit a layer of stone, naturally just an inch or so before required depth. I totally mystified him when I told him I was going to get my French Screwdriver. Cue amusement when I returned with a sledgehammer.
It turned out to be a piddling little layer of Horsham stone, complete with lithified ripple marks. Very cute.
A family member once had their front door knocked in by the police. With a history of self harm, and not being rousable by friends, there was concern for her safety. It was a while before we could afford to replace the door which was, despite being patched up as best he could by someone, "a bit wobbly".
'pointy end of a screwdriver'
Reminds me of the early days with the Pentium floating point bug, Compaq engineer came in to replace them all one day and using a screwdriver to lever the old one managed to plough it across the motherboard.
Of course it was the highest spec on spec one in the place, m/b was toast and they had to replace it for us..
"Also; No! My razor sharp woodworking chisel does not double as a screwdriver."
Or for opening paint tins. The damage to the poor chisel only balanced by the injuries caused to the misusing tool.
The catalogue of indignities to which the unfortunate wood chisel has been subjected would make anyone cry.
I have seen large bladed screwdrivers and claw hammers used together as a mallet and chisel often enough to admit tool misuse isn't limited to the untrained.
"Dieser Engländer ist der Hammer!"
Don't even try to understand those rules of "Der Die Das Diese Dieses Dieser Dessen ........". For most there is a logic behind it which can be explained, with a wall of text. And then there are the exceptions, the exceptions² and the exceptions³.
If you manage to get a driver license in Germany :P, else you'd have to walk to drink.
Though I don't know which country you are from. But if you are from the US you would have to redo your driver license. Which will show why we still have a quite low car crash death rate despite still being the "no speed limit" country. But the only reason why we are still without general speed limit is the car lobby making that over-alpha-testosterone-poisoned type screeeeaaaam "they take away our freedom!" while in reality you rarely can drive as fast as possible (i.e. 200+ km/h, or 125+ mph) due to traffic density. 160 km/h (100 mph) though happens quite often and would be a reasonable general maximum speed limit by German standards.
At school I switched from Latin to German because I was told it more 'logical' and phonetic. O god - twelve ways of saying 'the', baffling genders - Mark Twain visited Germany and did a very amusing article on the language. (Oth, I've found most Germans very friendly, and, yes, they can have a very good sense of humour).
Quote
"Everybody knows that a hammer is the right tool for the job."
And that you should charge the customer a nice round £1000 for each call out that needs the use of a hammer, to which the customer will always go ?????!!!!!!!!! and demand a breakdown of the costs after seeing what you did to fix the errant machine.
Such as
#2 thor copper/hide mallet : £30
Call out fee : £20
Knowing where to hit machine : £950
Of course the fees for correcting the staff are much much higher (but its so much more fun)
Is how these jammy buggers get away with it!
Shoving a screwdriver where it don't belong - been there, done that, cringed at the realisation.
Got clean away, without even a raised eyebrow, a smirk or the need to tell a colleague to "Don't say it, just - quiet"? Nope. Not a chance that'll ever happen.
Like Brian, people like this "Mel" are going to be caught by alien spaceships next time they fall off a tower: "Oooh, you lucky bastard!".
So I had some harddiscs hanging out the back of my computer with their ribbon cables. It was a Frankenstein machine with two power supplies, one for the machine and another for the drives (numerous because they were salvaged as people upgraded to bigger things).
After fiddling with something, I absentmindedly placed a screwdriver on top of my monitor and watched, reacting just a little too late, as it rolled down the back of the monitor and fell pointy end down right on top of a harddisc. Which, as I'm sure you can understand, reacted violently. Violently being "when I opened it up, there was a big gouge in the platter and the heads were rattling around inside."
Oops.
That day, I also learned a lesson about the importance of backups...
My friend, a few years younger than me, bought a posh new heat sink and fan for his PC and asked me if I’d fit it for him. It was the sort where you had to put a fair amount of force on the clip to get it in to place, and he was anxious about damaging the board. It was a routine job for me as I was swapping out maybe 20 motherboards a day at work. Bad caps were a constant problem back then.
Anyway, I messed it up, screwdriver slipped, severed a couple of tracks on the board and chipped off a little surface mount resistor. Some tense moments followed with a soldering iron, a couple of bits of wire and a fibreglass pencil. I managed to bridge the broken tracks and put back the resistor. To my great relief it booted back up and worked fine, but I felt bad when it stopped working about a year later and ended up buying him a new motherboard!
Similar story here, but I was building a server for a customer. My screwdriver slipped, and clonk knocked a capacitor right off it's leads. I knew that we didn't have any more of this particular board in stock, so I simply jammed the capacitor back onto it's wires and finished building the machine without telling anyone. Once in testing, it booted straight up, and seemed to work fine, so we sent it out.
If you bought a server (dual CPU Intel IIRC) from Evesham Micros in ~2005, I'm sorry. Still, we took more care building the servers than we did the consumer PCs....
Can you share an image of the SSD coaster? You kept your coffee mug on it as a constant reminder that reversed polarity only works on TV that's good to know. I used to keep my coffee mug on the custom coaster meanwhile I was watching TV and having a cup of coffee. Hmm just I went to another level but I am eagerly waiting for images.
">>"I was asked to help migrate this same customer's machine to a new environment.
With this epilogue, I hoped Mel was able to put his hands on the resurrected card... it was worthy of being mounted on the wall as a trophy!"
I was thinking between skewering the board and resurrecting it Mel must have traded his soul in some Mephistophelian bargain. The epilogue would suggest Mel's creditor is sending a payment due soon reminder. :)
A young lady secretary of my acquaintance in the days of DOS had a tower case next to her desk which she used as a coffee cup stand! This was fine with the old IBM 386s with a solid case which were more or less liquid proff. Then she got upgraded to a full fat 486DX (not IBM) which had air vents on the top. This lasted just over a week before it expired with a smell of burning PCB as hot coffee dripped onto the video card.
IT boss had a fit of the screaming abdabs....
I got on almost free Mac out of an accident like that. 60 MHz PowerPC. The company sold off some hardware that was too old to be useful. I bought two broken Macs for a fiver each.
One had a huge screwdriver scratch right through the motherboard. The other had its RAM and hard drive pinched. And one had a CD-ROM drive.
After some swapping I had one working computer. Then I found out I had put everything into the case without the cutout for the CD/ROM drive. No, there was no way to open it up. Had to take everything apart again and put it into the right case.
The worst damage I have seen done with a screwdriver was to themselves.
the second worst was to the person they were working with.
Screwdrivers, jewellers, normal little electrical and even woodworking-like ones have very small ends that become quite good at stabbing!
Because there were sharp edges in many PCs, I bet many people are very up-to-date with their tetanus shots but lots of people stab themselves when misusing them.
Life probably became safer with the introduction of electric ones. I never harmed myself with a screwdriver. I did drop an electric one on my foot though!
Some years ago I was opening a tin of paint to start on the outside of the house. My neighbour, a retired nurse, shouted over the fence "at least put a rag round your hand to do that, you wouldn't believe the number of people I've seen with a screwdriver stuck through their hand".
Since then I never seem to be able to find a rag at the right time, but I am very very careful.
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