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Comment by owenwil | Hacker News Reader

Yes - in my network admin days back in 2007, we were decommissioning our datacenter as we'd virtualized everything and as we were gutting the room we found our PABX/Voicemail server under the tiles, happily running away with OS/2. Nobody ever knew where it was and it had been installed 13 years before. The floor was on a UPS and generator so the power had never been disconnected.

It was happily chugging away, running our shitty phone system, and hadn't been restarted in 10+ years.

Edit: This also happened to me at a utility company I worked at. We had a server that ran some critical calculations for us but nobody could recall where it was physically located. It's way worse now that everything's virtualized - the cruft just sits there for years until you suddenly run out of resources and start looking closely.

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>nobody could recall where it was physically located.

ah yes, the good old "responds to pings but where is it?"

Does the ping protocol have any capability to provide location information? Because it should if it doesn't..

The usual method is to get the device's MAC address, use that to track down/identify the switch port it's connected to, then physically trace the network cable that's plugged into that switch port.

So often the switch cables disappear in a bundle into a cable tray in the ceiling.

That is a small hurdle when you have alligator clips and a multi-meter.

Or, if the hardware supports it, eject the CD/DVD ROM drive.

Do servers have onboard speakers these days? Can you make them beep in a distinct pattern?

Not full-fledged speakers I don't think. But buzzers I assume most have.

Many/most servers (or the ones I've dealt with the most, anyways) have an LED that can be activated remotely -- i.e. through IPMI, ILO, etc. -- but I can't remember what's it called at the moment. It can be very handy when you're remote and need to be able to direct someone (physically present) to a specific server.

Or light up IF led or so (Fujitsu). There are often indicators to make sure it's the right server.

Yup, precisely - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_serve...

Check out how ping actually works and you'll discover...there's no such thing as a ping protocol!

It was a silly hack that turned out to be clever and incredibly useful.

http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html

Meh Wtf!? From .ch I get:

"[USSC logo] APPLICATION BLOCKED

You have attempted to access a blocked website. Access to this website has been blocked for operational reasons by the DOD Enterprise-Level Protection System.

APPLICATION: qos-mission-critical-pan"

There isn't a separate ping protocol. Echo packets are part of the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). ICMP echo packets are used by both ping and traceroute.

In some sense, traceroute does often give you some location information.

However, if you're talking about GPS or other geolocation information, even now if a machine supports IPv4 and/or IPv6 and isn't a phone, it likely doesn't know any geolocation information about itself. No provision for geolocation information was provided in the ICMP echo or echo response packets.

There is the LOC record for DNS but that would probably require manual updating unless you attached a GPS receiver to your server/device.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOC_record

Same here, found abandoned routers in the ceiling at the school where I was doing junior sysadmin work.

Took us an afternoon trying to find out their origin and make sure they weren't malicious but in the end they were just eating watts.

Prior to opening the comments I thought no way somebody recently found OS/2. Not to one up you or anything, but we just found over a dozen (~15 I think) OS/2 machines in our environment two weeks ago..

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