I take back my statements about not being annoyed with Steam.

[Yegolev]

Power cabling + several years of dust is a good recipe for fires, and in some cases for underfloor smoke detection shutting your power down.

I think that's what the halon is for.

Plus not keeping it clean and organised means assclowns feel compelled to leave decommissioned wiring and junk under there, before long you can't trace wiring faults or decide whether random junk that's been plugged in for 20 years is doing anything legitimate.

We had the SCSI cables pulled from under the floor maybe 1.5 years ago.  Not because they were unused (they were certainly not being used) but because we couldn't put any more cables down and have the tiles lay flat.  We had some outages, despite the fact that the SCSI cables looked nothing like the live cables.  The "if it ain't broke" saying is a good one.

Ironwood, I have talked to people at companies that kept their servers in some weird places.  In that vein... a network connection to Uganda would be error-prone.

[Sky]

OK, I see.  The rack just vents the heat into the room then. 

No, it vents via a flex tube through the roof. If you've got whiskers in your subfloor and active cooling (fans), it's only a matter of time. Have good insurance.

On wiring: the guy who did data wiring before me was from a telco background and apparently hadn't heard of switches for ethernet (granted, in 2000 a lot of people were still using hubs, but switches were just cheaply available then..and he didn't use hubs, either). He had a dedicated wire for every machine. Have a cluster of eight pcs? Eight wires on a 100' run. It's nice to have a ton of wires to clip if I need an extra somewhere, because it was a good wiring job and he did use cat5, but holy crap there's a lot of wire running into our wiring closet.

[Yegolev]

Have good insurance.

Service contracts for servers, insurance for building.  Our machinery doesn't have that sort of lifespan anyway.  We have a few that are possibly eight years old, but most are just a few years old.  Another funny thing, our main datacenter has carpeted tiles.  Never saw that before.

Anyway, thanks for the link on whiskers, I never knew that.  Not that it matters.  If something on a server dies, we just replace it.  They don't seem to be accumulating under our floor last I looked, either.

He had a dedicated wire for every machine.

Now that's funny.  Reminds me of how the LAN switched to ethernet from token ring in 2000, only waiting so long because some management type didn't trust the "new" technology.

[Sky]

Well, he also used to take the entire network down frequently when 'load-balancing' and then mysteriously disappeared without explanation a few years ago. Too bad, he was a cool guy and played guitar.

[Fabricated]

Speaking of Steam, it has been 3 days since I sent in an email asking if I could have my password manually reset and sent to me since their dumb secret question thing is garbled. No response. Great.

[eldaec]

I think that's what the halon is for.

Environmental vandal!

[Yegolev]

Hey, no fire, no problem.  It's funny that halon is banned (in 2010) because of ozone depletion rather than being deadly to aerobic life forms.

As long as DuPont also owns the patent on the replacement product, it's all good.  Like Freon.