henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (09/29/84)
A few minutes from the end of a long but fairly routine monthly backup
(marred only by excessive retries towards the end of one tape, which
didn't recur after I cleaned the tape heads while changing tapes), I
noticed that the console terminal was... wet?!? Sure enough, the 4th
floor washroom had done it again, and water was soon dripping down in
abundance. Either the wonderful floor drain wasn't doing its job, or
we were getting the overflow. I finished the backup, shut things down,
moved the console, and starting putting wastebaskets and such under the
drips. Most of it was in the console area, with minor offshoots beside
the distribution panels and behind the 05 racks. I called 2222, and
they sent over first a U of T policeman and then an engineer and some
cleaners. They shut off the water upstairs and (I assume) mopped up
the mess; the drips slowed down and then pretty much stopped. I set
the console up in a new location, moved the DH distribution panel out
a few inches so that any new drips from the building expansion slot
would go behind it instead of into it, and brought Unix back up. This
last was delayed when Unix refused to acknowledge the existence of the
last 128KB of memory for some reason; after a bit of tinkering, the
problem went away. Je ne sais quoi what the hell...
We may want to think about some permanent rearranging of equipment to
avoid the danger areas.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry