Got paged this weekend. Arrived on-site to find... ants.
imgur.com/a/WWTUh
imgur.comPosted Jul 25, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC
55574
imgur.comWhat a fucking mess. You work for an ISP or something?
Clearly they were lured in by all the sweet sweet packets.
91
You work for an ISP or something?
Yes. Tier3/Sys/Net/Dev/Manager person. Our field people were fried from the storms we've been having so I ended up oncall over the weekend.
Erm, fried as in overworked fixing customers, not recovering from being hit by lighting.
It lasted from Saturday afternoon after I cleaned it out until early this morning when I sent my Jr. Admin out to enjoy some fresh air.....I mean swap out the nasty NID.
49
Got to know one of my ISP's techs pretty well when I had almost daily outages. He took me out to the main DMARC box down the street to show me what he was working with.
Looked like a bomb went off inside it from years and years of people getting in there and not cleaning up their messes.
Never seen one filled with ants though o.o
29
Looked like a bomb went off inside it
and then you have one of of my friends... When he was a teenager he stuffed the neighborhood telephone box full of M80s and lit it off. That'll teach Ma Bell to not leave those things unlocked.
2
What do you do when you come across this, how did you remove all the ants?
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Blew them out with canned air, sprayed the thing with ant killer, and then dumped ant powder on the bottom of the case. I may have gone overboard with the powder.
Anyway, that didn't fix it, just kept it running until Monday when I swapped from oncall hat to manager hat and sent the Jr SA out to replace it (being that field techs are still backlogged).
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Title: Devotion to Duty
Title-text: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 355 times, representing 0.2972% of referenced xkcds.
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15
Fire works good and well worth the extra expense of replacing the equipment if it reaches this bad of a problem.
2
ISP
packets
I see what you did there.
0†
What is this? TCP for ants?!
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You joke, but apparently ants use a system of communication that greatly resembles TCP's data/ack patterns.
This is a decent read: http://priceonomics.com/the-independent-discovery-of-tcpip-by-ants/
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Well consider me enlightened. Thanks for this!
2
IP over ant?
8
What is this? A service delivery switch for ants? http://www.ciena.com/products/3911
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Welcome to crazy ants!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasberry_crazy_ant#Attraction_to_electrical_equipment
We have well water here and I once found that they had shoved themselves in between the contacts of our pressure switch so the house had no water pressure. There were scads of 'em, but not quite as bad as this.
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Oh my god that's an actual ant breed name.
That's crazy.
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Ants
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Yellow crazy ants are one of the species featured in Ant-Man! :)
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And I can confirm it's an apt description. Those guys go nuts.
1
Holy fuck that's horrible. You need to repost this to r/techsupportgore
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I was going to originally but couldn't remember the name. So thank you! I didn't even have to post to r/tipofmytongue
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Also maybe r/cablegore ?
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Do you want packet loss? Because that's how you get packet loss.
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I wouldn't say the packages are lost, they are just re-routed by the ants.
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I have a friend who works for Honeywell. Their techs call these "crazy ants". They are actually drawn to the 60 cycle hum of the power in the units. They find them all over the southern US.
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The weird thing is this is powered by 12VDC from another cabinet (which is ant-free, though sealed correctly) so AFAIK there shouldn't be any hum.
Plus this is on the north side of the midwest US--should be well outside of the raspberry crazy ant's territory.
I'm wondering if the tech that installed it got some lunch on his fingers or something that initially attracted them and then they stayed for the warmth.
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Ants actually can be attracted to electrical devices or heat, http://www.livescience.com/37720-crazy-ants-invade-electronics.html
8
Crazy ant is actually its name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasberry_crazy_ant#Attraction_to_electrical_equipment
... though wikipedia, at least, seems less confident about the reasons why they're attracted to electrical stuff
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! WARNING !
EARTH GROUND MUST BE CONNECTED
Earth ground is not connected
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Earth ground is connected. Those instructions were written by the ants. Didn't you ever wonder why the manual had such small print?
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Check your logs for this:
94143243431512659321054872390486828512913474876027
67195923460238582958304725016523252592969257276553
64363462727184012012643147546329450127847264841075
62234789626728592858295347502772262646456217613984
829519475412398501
If you find it avoid anyone named Lenny or Marcy for a while. Nothing good will come of this.
EDIT: formatting
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Great movie
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"I accidentally god"
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Have you tried turning it off an on again though?
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Someone misunderstood these instructions: https://ant.apache.org/manual/install.html#installing
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This is it...this is the beginning of the end of human dominance...they always start with communications.
I, for one, welcome our new Ant overlords.
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Fucking gross. I can't stand them after what happened when I was little. I was eating some pancakes and had finished about half of them. I look down and they're covered in dead ants.....
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...
How the fuck does that even happen?
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They were a special ingredient in the maple syrup
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Goddammit Archer!
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Raspberry crazy ants. The guy who discovered them owns Raspberry Pest Control near where I live. They are called crazy ants because when they die they let off a pheremone that causes the rest of them to swarm and attack. They breed by the millions and are likely to be a recurring problem unless treated. Oddly enough they are attracted to electronics for some reason, something about ionization of the air or something. They are a big deal with housing in general though as they will invade the breaker box of houses shorting out the entire box and causing thousands of dollars in damages.
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Better than Bees!
I feel like this would be a great bonus level for SimAnt.
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I used to take tech support phone calls. I had an onsite tech call me one time and tell me that he got to the customer's house and cockroaches were streaming in and out of the place under the door.
I said "sounds like an unsafe work environment." He nearly cried thinking about going in that place. I told him to tell the customer to take their PC to the library or somewhere that it could be safely serviced.
You got screwed there.
4
Mothballs will keep the ants out of electrical equipment.
3
You cleared that with fire right?
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You need to debug your system.
Boooo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHoNWwhzh3M
^bot ^info
Boo Wendy