So I worked before in a certain unnamed nuclear power plant in the early 90’s.
To give you an idea off the security around the place, to get to the secured area, you had to walk through the security building, which was split in two by steel bars. Two openings through the bars were full body turnstiles that you could only get halfway through before they locked. You were faced with a hand scanner. Not a cool looking one that uses light to check your fingerprints. This one had bars sticking up that you put your hand against, and it measured the resistance of your skin between the various points.
Well, that was for us normal people. The Wackenhut security guards were all so huge from donuts, they couldn’t fit through the turnstile, and had to walk through the vehicle gates to get back and forth. And that was just the women security guards!
My story starts one fine winter day. Myself and one other person were the network administrators for the plant. Our office was inside the server room. We had maybe 20-25 servers running OS/2 and LANManager. We even were running Lotus Notes on those servers. The backup software failed on a daily basis. All our data storage was on external full height 1 gig drives. Yes, thats right, full height (3 inches tall and about 10 lbs!) 1 gig drives. It was a long time ago…
Outside, we had almost a foot of snow on the ground. Inside the server room, in the center of the building, on the third floor, the temperature was currently over 100 degrees farenheit. At 9am. And climbing.
It seems that the building’s heater system was on the fritz. And stuck on full blast. Directly feeding the server room. Being the third floor center, there were no windows to open. The room had a small access door but that was it. Even a full size floor fan couldn’t get the heat out fast enough, because there was no place for it to go, the whole building was affected, although not quite as hot as in our room.
No one would make the call to just turn off the damn heater. Pull the breakers or something.
About once every half hour, you would hear the unmistakable whine of a drive somewhere in the room giving up and spinning down, data lost forever.
And no one would let us turn off the servers either.
Phone call with IBM server support:
“Whats the maximum ambient temperature your servers can handle?”
“We recommend a maximum of 85 degrees”
“How bad is 110 degrees?”
“What? Turn them off, quick!”
“We can’t, we’re a nuclear power plant…”
“Oh… well, just pray you don’t lose too many then!”
6 hours later. We’ve lost over a dozen drives. Someone on the roof finally got the heating unit fixed. Still, no one had made the call to shut down the servers. Now, these weren’t running the reactors or anything, they were on the administration side of the plant. And yet top managers were still unwilling to make a decision! Gives you real faith in the beaurocracy, don’t it?

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