Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhilRodgers | Hacker News Reader

On a similar theme, I remember reading a story about a server that would crash mysteriously every couple of weeks. They eventually worked out that this happened whenever there was a new moon or a full moon, and the resulting high tide caused a battleship moored in a nearby harbour to rise just high enough that its powerful radar would interfere with the server.

View on HN

On a much smaller scale, I once worked for a wireless ISP. We had a customer who called in late September saying her service had been out for a few weeks. I went to her house and discovered that she was in a wheelchair and couldn't reach the controls for her air conditioner, so she was turning it on and off using the on/off switch on a power strip that was sitting on a desk. Her router was plugged into the same power strip. So as soon as the weather got cool enough to not need the AC, she lost her internet.

I once experienced a moored ship whose satellite Internet was extremely unreliable. It worked for 2 seconds and then it stopped working for two seconds, over and over. Only time it worked reliably was when there were no wind at all. After checking satellite images and corresponding to antennas pointing angle and ships position we eventually figured out that the antenna was pointing directly towards a wind mill. So when the rotor was turning it was intermittently blocking the signal between the satellite and the antenna. Luckily they were able to move the ship 50 meters forward and magically the Internet started working again.

I recall in the early days of WiFi, the advice around ops circles was that if you were trying to bridge two buildings using wireless, you had to set it up in the summer, not the winter. Because the water in the leaves of deciduous trees is enough to attenuate the signal. So now you've gone from "it's working" to "we have to start over," or worse, "yeah we can't actually do this."

I leech the Wi-Fi connection of a nearby convenience store from my home and have noticed that it’s much harder to get a strong signal in the summer than in colder months.

Heh, i remember a story of a server somewhere in train-station in Russia (iirc) - that'd sometimes spontaneously reboot...

Turns out, this always happens once a train with radioactive waste on it passes by - causing a few bits to flip in memory and a subsequent crash...

Can't seem to find the story online tho...

Had a customer next to railway tracks, who had some desktop computers freeze/reboot when train passed by. No radioactivity fortunately but apparently infrasound vibrations. Bought new computers with differently shaped towers or laptops and it was ok.

Crash Cows: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/crash_cows.html

What a crazy and horrible story.

Best wishes to everyone who was ok with providing irradiated cows to the plebs.

You remind me of a similar story, only failures would be a couple of times a year because of the positioning of the sun:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28688090

The first reply to that has a story that seems similar to the one you remember:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28689288

There must be a site with all of these stories but could not find it right now. The story about the car that would break down if you buy vanilla Ice Cream is one of my favorites. There’s also the story about the switch that is not connected anywhere but crashes the server every single time.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

And, of course, the bug where OpenOffice wouldn't print on Tuesdays! [0]

(It turned out to be a bug in 'file', not in OOo.)

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161

This one maybe: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/high_tide.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com