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by ansible 3691 days ago
I had another incident like that earlier in my IT career.

I was a 'terminal room consultant' in college... back when we had serial terminals hooked to Unix systems. Part of the job was the care and feeding of a couple printers, a big ol' line printer (green bar paper) and a Printronix graphics printer (dot matrix, for printing out fancy lab reports you wrote up using troff).

So over time, from loading paper and clearing jams, I had accumulated hours and hours of hearing these two guys chatter as they went about their business.

At one point, I noticed that the Printronix printer sounded funny. Just off, in some way. So I call it in for maintenance, but they don't seem to care what an undergraduate punk thought about printer sounds.

Sure enough, a week later, I see it is down and taken apart for repairs.

Your ears, your nose, all your senses should be used for debugging and general investigation.

1 comments

Here in the HGST EMEA lab, you will often find an engineer listening to a drive spin up with an induction pick-up and amplifier, muttering something like "Yep, this one's running firmware XYZ", or "Hmm, sounds like this one has the older, unmodified ramp".