[Sussex] [OT] An old story...

[Geoff Teale]

A long time ago, an old time UNIX guru told me the secret to good Sysadmin
was to always mount a scratch monkey.  I never really understood that, until
now, I just came across this story.

It seems that there was a certain university that was doing	experiments
in behavior modification in response to brain stimulation in primates.  They
had this monkey with a number of electrodes embedded in it's brain that were
hooked up to a PDP-11.  They had several programs that would stimulate
different parts of the monkey's brain, and they had spent over a year
training the monkey to respond to certain stimuli.

Well, eventually the PDP developed problems, and field service was called
in.  Due to some miscommunication, the field service representative was not
informed of the delicacy of this particular setup, and the people running
the experiment were not informed that field service was coming to fix the
machine.  The FS representative then booted up a diagnostic system I/O
exerciser.  After several minutes of gyrations, the monkey expired, its
brain fied.

The moral, of course, is "Always mount a scratch monkey."


-- 
GJT
Free Software, Free Society. 
http://www.fsf.org   http://www.gnu.org


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