Web Hosting Talk : Other Forums : Web Hosting Lounge : Bye-Bye Servers, It's Been Cool

[bumpylight]

How ... how? Cripes, how do you defend against an "employee security" issue like this?

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles...-Can-Deal.aspx

[sirius]

Yeah, sorry, just not buying that story... sounds like someone with a vivid imagination.

[jhadley]

It's possible but unlikely. Generally it's something that one shouldn't touch unless one has the proper authority to do so. That said, these greenfreaks cause more problems than they solve.

[bumpylight]

There's this in the comments section of the link:

Originally Posted by AdT

I vote for a fake. I don't doubt that one day an idiot would get up and do something totally stupid like turning off the AC in a server room. Well, actually, I believe that every day, an idiot gets up and does somthing that stupid.

But the e-mail - I don't believe it. Not only does this guy steal a key to get unauthorized access to the server room, in order to switch off the AC without authorization, but then he boasts about it on the company mailing list? And chastizes his coworkers for leaving the ACs running?

And the most suspicious thing: He destroys $200k worth of equipment and they merely lay him off instead of also suing the sh** out of him?

Then someone pointed out that similar but not pin-pointable versions of this story have been circulating for a while - this is very common for urban legends. I think this is the Republican version of the "Bush holds children's book upside down" or "Bush forgets to take caps off binoculars" legends, fabricated to make fun of $POLITICAL_OPPONENT, in this case "liberal tree huggers", obviously.

If the story were actually true, the Real WTF would be that in a server room stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars there is no temperature sensor that can trigger an automatic shutdown and service personnel alerts.

But then right after, there's this:

Originally Posted by Franz Kafka

You must be fresh out of college or something. I've met enough self righteous idiots to totally believe this, and enough penny pinching managers to believe they'd leave out the monitoring and alarms.

I think these two comments are fair at summarising the matter. It does have the smell of urban legend about it, but there are enough incredible morons around that it certainly could have happened. You pays your money and you makes up your mind on whether this is true or not.

[fastnoc]

Sounds to me like the twin to that bogus story about a porsche dealership manager.

First of all hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware and there's nobody manning a noc for 3 days.

yeahhhhh. no helpdesk? no techs?

not even remotely possible.

[Vortex-Steve]

Our AC "some how" got turned off a few days ago, got in in the morning and the temperature in the server room was 32C, everything was still working ok, but it was pretty toasty in there!

Only thing we could think of was one of the cleaners with access to our office did something on the AC not realising it was linked next door to the server room.

[EastDallas]

I doubt it's true either, the fact that the IT guys had no clue....but still, this could totally happen and we all know it! There are WAY too many idiots in this world!