On 8/06/2010 4:05 AM, Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>
> If you were scoping to see what was worth stealing, not a whole lot. ;-)
>

Drat.  Not worth the airfare.

>
> Right, for the cheap knock offs. That way, when the liquid fries one of
> the motors, I am only out a few dollars.

A tank of propane may have some possibilities with one of these although 
they probably are not powerful enough.

Once upon a time I worked as a sysprog for a bank.  There was an 
incident when water condensation built up in the air conditioning units 
on Level 3.  The outlet pipe had become blocked and water spilled over 
the collection pan, found a crack in the slab, trickled into a light 
fitting and collected until it broke the fitting and dumped out. 
Estimated to be about 10 litres of water.

Then the real drama began.  Level 2 was the main computer room.  The 
light fitting was the one sitting above the disk system housing amongst 
other things the volumes for the mainframe running the production online 
system.  Water + Electronics = Failure.

Much mayhem ensued.

The link is that one of the IBM engineers had the idea to get some 
industrial gas heaters in to help dry things out.  These were large 
blowers with gas burning in the air stream.  Crank up the speed and 
amount of gas and they were quite impressive.  Somewhere less than a 
rocket motor but still a *lot* better than a hand electric hair dryer.

Quite an interesting day.  I had a spare system image on another disk 
unit on the other side of the computer room.  We got the system back up 
in the evening and got through batch in time for the next day.  The 
affected unit was rebuilt.  It needed some new controller boards but the 
physical drives were fine.  No data lost.

Good blokes those IBM engineers.

Not so good is the idea of putting the air con plant directly above the 
computer room.

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