[Smushman]

Your being conspiratorial...

In my job, I am cleaning up (maybe more like 95% throwing out than cleaning up) some 30 year old equipment pileup across 4 separate server rooms. Ancient workstations and servers, such as Sun SPARC's, SGI's, Sun Oracles, HP-UX, AIX, and even a mainframe or 2 that have sat turned on and running an OS and networked (so respond to ping), but are actually lying dormant, stuffed in a closed door rack and networked in (often with long forgotten passwords).

This tool was something I wished I had (and searched all over for) to quickly catalog the approximate age of each responding ping. I could use this to further say hey this set is 1-10, this one 10-20 yrs old, and the last set 20-30. I can safely de-rack the 10-30 now, and work on rooting in to the remaining 1-10 yr systems over time. Instead, I have to root one rack at a time, and guess/research at many of the ages of the systems, which increased the work significantly.

Why? A good question. Research scientists and interns deployed them for projects. And when the project was done, a research scientist doesn't want to lose valuable research data. Since they are paid for, why not just leave them up. That, and the old sysadmin just retired - think of The Bastard Operator From Hell, but in real life, 20 years on.

[user9182031]

This seems like a really complex way to solve a simple problem. Have an intern spend a day creating Visio diagrams of each room capturing model numbers. Trying to do this from a network perspective just seems like an easy way to miss half the systems or whatever percentage isn't powered on or connected.