Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/MachineRoomRaccoon
Apparently our (university) machine room now comes with the bonus of a visiting raccoon. I have nothing against Toronto's charming trash pandas, but I do have a strong preference for them to be outdoors and maybe a bit distant.
(There are so far no signs that the raccoon has decided to be a resident of the machine room. Hopefully it is too cool in the room for it to be interested in that.)
Naturally there is a story here. This past Monday morning (what is now two days ago), we discovered that over the weekend, one of the keyboards we keep sitting around our machine room had been fairly thoroughly smashed, with keycaps knocked off and some scattered some distance around the rack. This was especially alarming because the keyboard (and its associated display) were in our rack of fileservers, which are some of our most critical servers. The keyboard had definitely not been smashed up last Friday, and nothing else seemed to have been disturbed or moved, not even the wires dangling near the keyboard.
Initially we suspected that some contractor had been in the room over the weekend to do work on the air conditioning, wire and fiber runs that go through it (and are partially managed by other people in entirely other groups), or something of that nature, had dropped something on the keyboard, and had decided not to mention it to anyone. Today people poked around the assorted bits of clutter in the corners of the room and discovered increasingly clear evidence of animal presence near our rack of fileservers. The fileserver rack (and the cluttered corner where further evidence was uncovered) are right by a vertical wiring conduit that runs up through the ceiling to higher floors. One speculation is that our (presumed) raccoon was jumping into our fileserver rack in order to climb up to get back into the wiring conduit.
