[techtalk] Smoking kills!

[Doc Nielsen]

> 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 ;))

To the best of my knowledge: smoking + computers = smoking computers.

I have seen a senario simmilar to this one, at my old work-place
My ex-boss used to smoke a great deal... and as the techie he was, he never
had the cover on his MEGA-tower, so when push came to shove, his MainBoard
went up with a "HSSSSSSBANG!"

Quite the laugh of the office... but we all have to learn somehow..
So let this be my warning to all you smokers.
Heavy smoking = tar and nicotine in PC and PowerSupply.


Doc