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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

Not the 10000, but I admin'd a 4500 back in 1999 at Bristol-Myers Squibb at the ripe old age of 21. It was running Sun's mail server, which required constant care and feeding to even remotely reliably serve our 30,000+ users.

One time it just stopped responding, and my boss said "now, pay attention" and body-checked the machine as hard as he could.

It immediately started pinging again, and he refused to say anything else about it.

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This reminds me of the “drop fix” for the sparc station where people would pick up the box and drop it to reseat the PROMs.

Amiga had a similar issue. One of the chips (fat Agnes IIRC?) didn't quite fit in the socket correctly, and a common fix was to pull out the drive mechanisms and drop the chassis something like a foot onto a carpeted floor.

Somewhat related, one morning I was in the office early and an accounting person came in and asked me for help, her computer wouldn't turn on and I was the only other one in the office. I went over, poked the power button and nothing happened. This was on a PC clone. She has a picture of her daughter on top of the computer, so I picked it up, gave the computer a good solid whack on the side, sat the picture down and poked the power button and it came to life.

We call this: Percussive Engineering

Apparently you also had to do this with the Apple ///.

I can't wait for the mandatory "brendan gregg screams at disks" youtube link.

There you go :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

(btw it's titled "Shouting in the Datacenter")

Ah, the old "Fus Ro Data Loss" vulnerability.

Ah, percussive maintenance! Also good for reseating disks that just don’t quite reliably get enumerated, slam the thing back in. I had to do something similar on a power supply for a V440, thankfully it was a month or so away from retirement, I didn’t feel too bad giving it some encouragement like that. Great machines.

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