Date : Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:16:48 +0000
From : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Them pesky case stickers (was 1MHZ SCSI/ATA board.)
philip pemberton wrote:
>> Although I did write a 3D app that would let you click on a machine name and
>> it'd zoom in to where it was located in the building (it was primarily
>> designed for finding people rather than hardware :)
>
> That sounds pretty nifty.
Philosophy at that place was rather nice - most customer projects would run
for a year or so, but inbetween staff were encouraged to take a "what cool
stuff can I write today?" attitude. Good for morale and learning I suppose,
produces stuff that's potentially reusable elsewhere etc.
>> Of course it relied on the locations database actually being kept up
to date,
>> which wasn't likely to happen in the long run (I used to be as guilty as
>> anyone else for that, liberating hardware from other projects that hadn't
>> been
>> used in a while for whatever latest and greatest thing I was working on!)
>
> What about tracerouting the machine?
Hmmm, not sure - we were primarily on token ring (better performance under
load and yadda yadda) so I don't know if it'd work there.
I suppose for Ethernet it'd be enough to pin down which segment a machine was
on...
> # trace-machine proteus
> looking up id... 0x49BFDEAD-0x39EADFEA
> rfid ping... found... localising...
> machine location: building CS, floor 3, room 8
>
> Actually, that could be kinda fun... maybe have a few lower power transceivers
> in each room and use them to triangulate the position of the machine...
Yep. At least get it down to a few metres anyway. I'm not sure how expensive
the readers are though, maybe it just doesn't make economical sense from that
angle.
> "Never lose an expensive server again!".. well, unless someone steals
it that is...
We used to have kit just up and vanish at times, presumably taken by
employees. I don't think we ever lost any servers, but there were certainly
monitors and memory went walkabout a few times.
cheers
Jules