[techtalk] Smoking kills!

[Magni Onsoien]

Today our server died. Since autumn 1999 it has been in a machine room
in the corner of an open office (no ceiling above the machine room, just
walls). In this office all the 6 employees are heavy smokers (thank God
I'm not working there!), so there is constantly smoke in the machine
room. The server of course had its chassis on, but it was still covered
by a thin layer of dust and tar all over, also on the inside.
About two months ago another server died. It looked like it might be the
disk, as there were lots of I/O-errors. However, fsck showed no errors
and things worked fine after a boot. After the next crash with the same
I/O-errors we took the server away and put the standby-box there in
stead. A closer physical examination of the server showed a layer of tar
and dust, just as on our server, and later the IDE-controller on the
mother board cracked with a big bang! We defined it dead.

So, obviosly we suspect smoke to be the evil one here. Has anyone
experienced problems with servers or workstations in enviroments with
heavy smoking? It would be nice if we could tell our client that HIS
clients' servers may die because of the smokefilled environment, and
that they should do something about this, and support this with
experiences and data from other people or sources (they kind of know we 
are anti-smokers and may be a bit biased ;))


Magni :)
-- 
sash is very good for you.