World’s Worst Server Location

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You’ve all heard the term “the server is crapping out,” well, now you know where it came from. Somebody please tell me this is a joke.

There will be a sign on the woman’s door that can be changed from OPEN to CLOSED and vice versa. Should you need to enter the server room, please change the sign to CLOSED. Once you are done, please change it back to OPEN. Once you enter the bathroom, you will be able to access the server room via the handicapped stall. Please close the stall door prior to entry, just in case someone doesn’t see that the bathroom is closed.
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I use to work for a school district that had new school built and the network closet was through a girls bathroom through 2 doors. Not as bad as this but still a silly location.
 
Wow, just wow.

I'm going to assume they don't go into the server room much. Otherwise that might be a problem.
 
I've worked at a client walled off a stall and turned into their server room. The entire head end for their organization.

Horrible working environment.
 
Simply amazing.

Hopefully people going to the bathroom there on a daily basis don't make it so routine as to automatically disregard the sign :)
 
This would be about 10 times more awesome if the door was hidden behind some kind of secret panel. Imagine taking a crap when the wall opens in front of you revealing a thin bespecticled guy who facepalms and yells "The sign!" before retreating back to his hole until you're done.
 
You've all got it backwards...

In an effort to increase productivity and reduce server down time management has installed a bathroom inside the server room. This reduces the time admins are away from their post. Next step is adding remote consoles in each stall so admins can still provide system input while simultaneously handling their output.

U.M.
 
Heh, in my last job we had two offices in quite close proximity, our main office, which had our server room, required renovation and the second office didn't have space for them.

The company rented out the basement of one building and a couple of floors of another to re-locate stuff and staff, but none had abundant space, so we wound up with our servers spread across three locations, luckily all three sites were within walking distance and we were able to get all three on a nice dedicated fibre ring which gave us more bandwidth between the sites than we had between the servers in the same pysical office.

In the basement office (which also became the IT office) however, the room where the fibre terminated, and coincidentally the only area that we could readily secure because of the way the building was designed, was the ladies toilets, so we ripped out the last stall and built a steel security wall and door that cut off the last third of the room, and put a couple of cabinets in there on platforms (incase of flooding).

We then turned the ladies room into the mens room, and vice versa by swapping the signs.

It was pretty ghetto, but only lasted a few months, and the newly renovated original office had a nice custom built server room, which we hadn't had before.

The humour came from guests coming back from the head with a slightly confused look on their faces wanting to know what we kept in the bathroom that was so important that it needed a steel door and electronic keypad :p
 
Just think of the gossip you can hear from the server room if you purposely left the sign on 'open'
 
At my old high school we have servers in terrible locations. One of them is down the basement, which is basically tunnels. It's always around 85F degrees, has water dripping on the cabinet from the steam pipes, it gets caked with cockroaches that love EMI, and mice chew the network cables.
 
Beats some of the other ones I've seen.
 
I would imagine servers are kept in bathrooms in some older buildings for the same reason phone and network panels are. Some buildings are too old and lacks real estate, so you have to make do with whats available.

But lordy, imagine if that toilet overflowed.
 
Now I can take a dump and work on the servers at the same time. Genius!!!!!! All they need now is a tech support phone in the stall so you can answer calls too.
 
ussra2 said:
I use to work for a school district that had new school built and the network closet was through a girls bathroom through 2 doors. Not as bad as this but still a silly location.
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When I did networking for my local school system one of the schools had a network closet in a converted bathroom. Pretty much they removed the shitters,sinks, and deviders and that was it. The janitors also used it as a storage closet. Man it was fucking nasty.
 
So does the Server still display a blue screen as its pushing out a memory dump?
 
i don't have any really funny bathroom related stories....but the school i work for is expanding - they're building a huge new addition onto the existing main building we have now - and we're supposed to get occupancy in august.

funny thing about this whole situation is....they've been on a new staff hiring binge now for almost a year (for instructors and other positions - IT is getting shafted...yet again)...we have ZERO space for offices now, and during an A/C reno, our programmers and half the server admins (as well as our CIO, head DBA, and purchaser) are all being squeezed into a drop in computer lab (or shoved in the dingy basement with mold) until the reno's are done.....ahhhh i feel bad...but we were told the room i'm in was made for 4 people....they just yesterday put the 7th cube in this room and we're still expected to have a work bench with +/- 16 PC's.....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
 
I have 2 network closets that are located behind bathrooms. The entrance to both are located in the last stall of the bathrooms.

For a couple of weeks we had a faulty switch in one of them. It was always funny when someone called saying the switch was down. More than once I had to tell them there was going to be a delay in getting the switch reset due to the stall being in use. :eek:

But my best network location is in our Chapel. It is in the crypt. Nothing like having to walk around a mausoleum to get to run network cable. The part that sucks about that is that all of my student techs are afraid and refuse to go down there, (stupid kids) so I have to do all the work.
 
My company's server room is in an old changing room for singers/other performers... It's spacious and has a bathroom off of it. Not to bad a deal considering it's in a 90 year old arena!

I would hate to have that one though.
 
This reminds me of that story I read on the [H] a few weeks ago about using modified E.Coli bacteria to do computations. Maybe this pic is from the research facility?

:D
 
Why would they put it in the women's room.... women break stuff like that. hahah
 
I worked at a job where the servers were in the bathroom too.
 
Looks like some PHB got the wrong idea when he heard an admin saying he needed to 'Flush the Cache' :D
 
brom42 said:
I have 2 network closets that are located behind bathrooms. The entrance to both are located in the last stall of the bathrooms.

For a couple of weeks we had a faulty switch in one of them. It was always funny when someone called saying the switch was down. More than once I had to tell them there was going to be a delay in getting the switch reset due to the stall being in use. :eek:

But my best network location is in our Chapel. It is in the crypt. Nothing like having to walk around a mausoleum to get to run network cable. The part that sucks about that is that all of my student techs are afraid and refuse to go down there, (stupid kids) so I have to do all the work.
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I would dig working in a crypt.. then at least you could be well aware when the undead uprising begins... and it justifies carrying a boomstick.

Side question - what sort of business do you work with that has a chapel on site? University or parochial school?
 
modi123 said:
I would dig working in a crypt.. then at least you could be well aware when the undead uprising begins... and it justifies carrying a boomstick.

Side question - what sort of business do you work with that has a chapel on site? University or parochial school?
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Private school that was founded in 1858. The first Chaplin for the school who oversaw the building of the chapel is buried in its basement.
 
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