Not a big red button, but close.  IBM CE's just finished replacing an HDA in
IBM 3380 cabinet.  They were picking up the crashed HDA sitting on the floor
at the head of the string when one of the CE's loses his balance.  Hand
swings over his head and hits the disable switches on about 12 of the 16
disks in the string.  Within a week all switches in entire room have
Plexiglas over them.

-----Original Message-----
From: Duffy, Peter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 2:44 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: HALON et al


The one dump I was in was after a water alarm went off due to an A/C unit
drain clogging and a puddle finally triggering the alarm.

Operator ran to the panel, did not know what to do so they decided to do
SOMETHING, they pulled the manual release.  I was the second one out after I
got hit with liquid HALON.  Thick hair saved me from frostbite. One nozzle
broke off from the ceiling, dented a floor tile pretty well. I was the
second one out as I had an operator impaled on my right arm as I pushed
through the doors. 

We had training the next week on override procedures.  Press and hold, call
security, wait for instructions.  So I asked, "where's the phone?" Manager
looked at me like I was stupid and pointed to one wall.  So, I asked,
"where's the override?" and he angrily pointed at the button in front of
him.  On another wall, 20 feet away from the phone.  It dawned on him as
people started to laugh.  I never saw the telephone people install a new
phone so fast.  3rd shift was a one person show and the usual operator
thanked me as she laughed.

Next dump was on a Saturday at another site, I got paged, a water alarm,
manual release, yada yada yada.  Walked them through the power up over the
phone as I gasped between laughs as I drove over.

Any good Big Red Button stories?  Hehehehe  Seen my share of those.  Had a
customer VP say, "That button?  It's not hooked up to anything."  He pushed
it and 30 spacecraft engineers on high end UNIX boxes started screaming as
the room plunged into darkness.  All I had said was, "can we get facilities
to remove it when we have a scheduled building power outage?"  He said yes.

/ptd

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Leonard Woren
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: HALON et al

On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 01:55:23PM -0500, Ned Hedrick
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> There is also a product called Inergen -- a mixture of 52% nitrogen,
40% 
> argon and 8% carbon dioxide -- that claims to be safe to the
environment 
> and people.

Except for those who need to breathe.

The bottom line is that regardless of the chemical makeup, any gas used for
computer room fire suppression is going to displace the oxygen that people
need to breathe.  What I was told by the experts way back when is that "if
the Halon dumps, hold your breath and 
leave the room immediately."  That's why the Halon alarm is loud 
enough to wake the dead in the next county.  I heard it once and I was
across the hall in my office.  Fortunately that was only from a careless
workman who had accidentally tripped the fire alarm and an alert operator
ran over and held the override button to prevent the Halon from dumping.
Saved us $30,000 in 1981.


/Leonard

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