🚀 go-pugleaf

dons@olympus.net (Don Schmelling) writes:

>Bernd "Bernie" Meyer (root@wombat.hanse.de) wrote:
>: dons@olympus.net (Don Schmelling) writes:
>: 
>: b) If you came to my place and would look at the computer, you'd not hear a
>: harddisk (spins down after 1 minute idle), not see a power light (they are
>: just annoying bits of light, and I sleep in the same room, so they are not
>: attached) and hear no fan (it's a regulated Papst fan, very very silent, see
>: above). If that made you flip the switch, you'd be in a lot of trouble!

>I would still be able to tell.

Now I'm curious --- by what?

>: c) look at your average Workstation in a computer room. It often doesn't
>: have any lights, or these are well hidden behind some panel. There are many
>: machiens around all making a humming, nearly unlocatable noise. Hard to tell
>: whether they are on or off
>The average Workstation in data centers I have visisted everything was in
>plain sight.

Everything --- does that include a power LED? Or how about those wonderful
Apollo Workstations (also sold by Siemens) that have 4 blinkenlights,
but none of them is for power, so a idle machine had no lights. Same thing
is true for at least some HPs, I think.

>: d) Accidentally switching _off_ a workstation is a very bad idea. in the
>: best of cases, it just takes a long time to come up again. Worse cases
>: involve the sudden killing of long running background processes, potentially
>: in the middle of a disk write. Worst case is filesystem corruption leading
>: to massive data loss. And that's from someone who knows --- now what horrors
>: do you think a _user_ might imagine?
>This is laughable.  I have been in too many data centers to listen to this...
>You really didn't have to go through all of this stuff, I am aware of the
>potential dangers.

And you still declare that any user who goes by "better safe than sorry", and
who _isn't_ aware of the exact danger but has a good feeling that switching
off a running machine is very very bad (it is about the second thing you tell
them, after explaining how to log in) is dumb? Strange.

>: _Of course_ a computer needs power. But
>: a) The user might never have seen a power switch
>: b) The user might not consider himself permitted to flip said powerswitch.
>It was impossible to miss.
>I can see where point b) would be a good argument, but in this case we were
>talking about TRS-80 computers in 1988.  Not exactly a huge investment.

Uh --- did a TRS80 have blinkenlights? I know my MTX-500 didn't.


Bernie
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