Your computer room will overheat next weekend (opens in new tab)

Unless you work in a large organization, the "system adminstrator" often isn't actually a System Administrator

The zillions of little companies with this kind of problem disagree.

Not really. In the future there will be a whole crop of system administrators who don't ever deal with hardware and data center issues thanks to cloud computing. There will still be plenty to do and plenty to worry about.

You clearly have not leased space in a building owned and run by accountants.

• 4:00pm? Shut it off. Leave the blowers going at least. (Had negotiate life support systems until 6pm in the next lease.)

• Long weekend? Shut it off.

• Compressor that drives the thermostat system fails? Get a cheap household unit from Harbor Freight. (Thunderously loud, ran nearly 24 hours a day, for a while anyway.)

• One of the two main air fans broken? Don't fix. Air still moves. It's ok, I can put on the hearing protection and work in the server room in the afternoons when my west facing office is uninhabitable.

• The remaining fan breaks on Memorial day weekend. Why‽ It was already running 24x7, this is just cruel timing! Now the building gets way too hot and starts transferring heat through the uninsulated walls into my machine room overloading my cooling capacity.

It has certainly done that in at least one building in Boston I worked in.

That's how it works in my office building. It also kicks off at 7PM on weekdays. It may not be completely off, but you can hear it blowing all day and at 7PM there's a loud THUMP in the vents and no sound after that.

Not a problem, our server room has independent cooling that takes the heat to a unit on the roof. It might have to work a little harder on long weekends but we keep track of our heat budget and this isn't a problem.

I've been surprised just how long "amateur" server rooms survive cooling failure. Mostly becuase the densities tend to be lower, but also becuse you just get lucky with the way they're built. At our current office we had a server room total cooling failure (due to copper piping stolen off the back of the building...) and although it got very hot (and very loud) in there, we didn't get any machine failures or thermal shutdowns. But you could feel the heat radiating out of the walls the rooms around and above the server room were noticably hotter. If we'd been an older building or the server room had been built for physical security, the thicker walls would have trapped the heat and it would be a different story.