[ Originally a Facebook post, copied here for posterity. ]
Some thirty years ago I was told the story of a server with an oil lamp on the side (the kind that Greek Orthodox people light to honor God and the Saints). It was put there to humor the situation: the server need not break under any circumstance.
Well, it has been my experience of many years, sectors and shops of different sizes, that no matter what, there is always at least one key system that “needs” an oil lamp by its side in the organization. A system that is critical enough to warrant all the attention it gets, yet so critical that nobody risks upgrading / changing / phasing it out during their tenure (the system is guaranteed to outlive them; I count three such systems that have outlived me). Untouchable systems that get replaced only when they physically die.
Seek out who needs an oil lamp. Plan accordingly.
[ There’s another “law” that follows as a result of the oil-lamp, but maybe for another time. ]
Achilles Voliotis writes:
The candle was placed (without oil) for fun on the VAX-750 by Spyros Potamianos, while I was admin in softlab. Since VAX was running (initially, then we installed 4.2 BSD) the Unix version of the DEC called ULTRIX, he had also put an empty bottle of the well-known shampoo ULTREX with changed E to I with a marker.
The VAX 750 consisted of 2 "boxes" (~ 30U). The lamp was on the disk device (170 MB, "removable") and became famous for a strange story that makes you become superstitious or believe in Murphy's laws.
During a service visit by the DEC technician, he saw the lamp on the "disk drive", and started joking ("you are not serious", what has the lamp to do with computers, etc.). And in a theatrical move he throws a smack at the candle that falls down.
In a satanic coincidence, the "disk drive" (actually it was a closet weighing more than several hundred Kg), almost at the same time made some strange sounds and stopped working !!!
The sequel was quite adventurous, due to a painful history between the DEC and its representative office in Greece and Cyprus (DCC). In short, for ~ 2 months, a team came to the softlab every 1-2 days, which never had 2 Greeks (French+German, Greek+German, Italian+ Greek, etc.), they disassembled the device into parts, all of them were replaced (some of them more than once), with always the same result: The "disc" spun, sometimes it worked 4-5 minutes and in the end was failing with the same strange noise.
At some point, after two months of ineffective repairs, a team comes with two Greeks (no foreigners). They Opened the lid, modified the settings in a DIP switch, closed the lid and ... the disk started working normally!
After this adventure the candle came back on the disk pack and stayed there for a very long time.
Managing organized complexity 