Stories old maylrushechki

Last-minute servers, a catastrophic fall in services, the heroic rescue of a portal with the help of a wife left at the computer. So a fantastic technotriller could begin, but in fact the story of the Russian Internet began, of which we became a part.

Today, in honor of the 18th anniversary of the company, we will for the first time tell about the real history of Mail.Ru Group. For the first time in years of life, we’ll share what used to be at the level of myths and legends, even within the company itself. We talked to people who had worked in the company for many years and were directly involved in all the events.

Vladimir Gabrielyan, Vice President, Technical Director, Head of the Search business division and e-commerce Mail.Ru Group

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2001. The first working day

On the first working day, I was given the task to install the Solaris operating system on the server. She was pretty exotic to me. Frankly, I saw her for the first time in my life. But there was no choice. The operating system was installed, then it rebooted and "said" that it lacked some kind of drivers. This was my first assignment, so I did not dare go home. And put the OS for three days, without leaving the office.

The Solaris distribution kit in the company daddy was given to me by the head of office administrators: “We always install from this disk - everything works.” In desperation, I realized that I worked only the first day (first, then the second, then the third), but I completely fail. I was a good sysadmin, I already had experience. And then the first task in the new place, but I can not cope with it.

I was about 20, the boss was ten years older, an adult very much, in my opinion. He walked around the office with a cup of tea and rang with a spoon. He always walked with a cup, and we determined where it was now by the sound of a spoon. And on the third day, when I tried at least ten times all the ways of installing Solaris, described on the Internet, he comes to me, rings with a spoon, and in a fatherly way asks: “Well, what, does not work?” I say: “Listen I have not left work for three days. ” He told me: “Okay. Keep the correct distribution. And stretches the disc.

Peacock at the data center

In 2001, when 40 people worked in the company, I was a network administrator. There were few equipment at that time, about 150 servers, but there was very little money for their maintenance and service. Accordingly, when something broke, we ourselves repaired this “something”.

Once, Dima Grishin and I ( CEO of Mail.Ru Group ) came to Krasnokazarmennaya Street, where the first and only data center in Russia at that time was located, in order to repair the broken server. Our fuss with the server dragged on - we worked until five in the morning. We left early in the morning from the data center to a deserted street. We are waiting for a passing car to catch it from the hand. I first worked the day, then - all night, tired. And then I see the street slowly moving ... peacock!

Moscow, five in the morning, not a single person on the street. I smoke, look at this peacock and think to myself: “Well, tryndets, reworked”. I turn to Dima and see that he, too, looks approximately in the same direction. We are silent. How to ask the manager: “Do you see a peacock?” And if he says “no,” what should be done? Silence stretched for about a minute and a half, then Dima gently asked me: “Do you see him too?” I respond with a sigh of relief: “Yes, also.” What the peacock did there at such an hour, we never found out.

^{Office on Gun Street}

The most enduring project

At that time there were only 40 people in the company, it became very difficult to support projects (there were 40–50 of them), we did it with all our strength. And we had one abandoned project, which no one was engaged in and which worked smoothly. Whatever happened, he somehow seamlessly existed. At a certain point we asked the question: “How is that? A lot of projects, from time to time there are problems on each of them, but for that though. ” Studying this question, we went to the server and saw that someone was connected to it remotely. It turned out that the developer who had long left the company had supported the project for many years, unable to part with it.

Alexander Gorny, Chief Information Officer, Mail.Ru Group

2001. How I turned off the Poster

September 11, 2001 - the date for us is even more memorable than for the majority: we not only kept a close eye on the events around the terrorist attack, but also tried to make our users have such an opportunity. News.mail.ru , while news.list.ru , was already one of the largest news resources of the Runet. But he was not supposed to have a separate server, he worked on one Pentium 3 with several other projects such as Posters and Sport.

^{Office on Nikolskaya street}

And now there is a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, users, of course, run to the Internet for details, and we have to ensure the work of the service with a tenfold load. The whole evening we were doing emergency optimizations: first we made the main Mail.Ru page static, then the pages with the key news. At some point I decided to turn off Poster because it was eating up resources, and News was clearly more important at that moment. It does not take half an hour, as the manager of the “Poster” calls me on my mobile phone: “Sasha, my project doesn’t open something.” How could I answer her? Only this way: "I turned it off."

Igor Ermakov, Head of Instant Messaging

2003. Workplace

The first two weeks in the Mail.Ru Group, I was in principle not sure whether they hired me or not. They gave me a task, but nobody asked me: “What? How? Where? "I thought:" Damn, I work at all here or not? "

The developers then sat in the office on the gun. Only just appeared liquid crystal screens, but they were not very common and for the company were still terribly expensive. Virtually no one had this, everyone sat on a CRT. When I arrived, I was asked which monitor I wanted. I said: "Of course, more." And the two sysadmins looked at me, looked at each other — and said nothing, only smirked. I only then realized the essence. A powerful power cable passed through the wall, and from it there were such interferences that the whole picture in the monitor split. And the bigger the monitor was, the bigger the image was. After a couple of days I asked for a smaller monitor.

Theaters and programmers

Flush with our windows in the courtyard on the pedestal were shops. In these summer benches, students of the Shchepkinsky school were sunbathing. And we had two trump jobs - both right near the window. After a month or two, as I got a job, they put me in one of these places. And two people who had been working for a long time were terribly offended and didn’t talk to me at all for a couple of days.

And next to our office was one of the most famous vegetarian restaurants "Jagannat". It was very chic to buy a sausage near the subway and fill up the restaurant. You could just come with a sandwich and stand, watch. But it caused absolutely inexpressible emotions among visitors and staff.

Server works

When the poplar fluff season began, he scored grids in radiators in server racks. During this period, two employees sat and cleaned the grilles, and a third stood with a hose and watered cooling systems. At this moment, our servers were burning in the literal sense of the word. It was impossible to enter the data center: the temperature rose to 60 degrees. Admins went to the toilet, soaked their clothes on themselves, ran into the server room and after three to five minutes left it completely dry. We turned off the servers, because otherwise they could just physically burn. Naturally, some solution was needed. They became stuffing machines Gabrielyana.

Stuffing machine

When Volodya Gabrielyan built the M100 data center, an interesting system of emergency temperature reduction was used there. The idea is that on one side of the building metal shutters opened, and on the other side huge fans were launched. They were absolutely safe, but they were called “Gabrielyan's stuffing machines” because they looked very scary. It seemed that a cow could be turned into mince in a second.

Once a large delegation arrived there - Dima Grishin, investors, shareholders. They are shown a beautiful data center, which is configured to identify the iris, you can only move in shoe covers. According to the plan, we had to turn on the stuffing machine, demonstrating a unique (no one in Russia at that time had) cooling system, which blows the data center for about half a minute if normal refrigeration systems fail.

Dima Grishin conducts a tour, shows minced cars. Volodya Gabrielyan gives a signal - and the stuffing machine starts. There is a buzz. We see a cloud of thick dust starting to rise from under the floor. For half a minute, the system actually created a vacuum and began to suck air from under the floor. Then it turned out that the sysadmins were so worried that they forgot to open metal blinds, so there was not enough air to blow through, and he reached out from under the floor.

By the way, this system has never been launched in combat mode. The cooling system was calculated correctly, and everything always works properly.

Removal of the operating system

In Unix, there are commands with which you can delete a large amount of data without special questions from the operating system. Once Sasha Gorny was mistaken in this team. There is a key that can be set - and the operating system will not ask you again, but will simply do what you ask. We’ve got used to the fact that when you delete something, the system asks you "Delete or not?", And right here is a hardcore command on Unix and a key that means "Do not ask anything." Try to delete as much data as possible that fell into the specified template. ”

Mining was wrong and ran this command on the root partition. I remember how we sit quite calmly, and suddenly Volodya Gabrielyan jumps up in his seat and shouts: “She’s leaving me! She is right from under my hands! I’m just looking at him: "Vova, what's going on?" - and we see how Sasha, who is sitting next to us, starts to fuss and says: "It seems, it’s me." Yes, he just made a mistake and blew us the car through which we went to all Mail.Ru servers. And it paralyzed us for a while.

2005/2006. How we worked at corporate

^{Igor Ermakov, Alexander Gorny, Vladimir Gabrielyan, 2003}

We had a second or third year corporate in the history of the company. Then only had the opportunity to go from the phone to the Internet via GPRS and modems, which allowed to do it at insanely slow speed.

Sysadmin Mikhalych did not like corporate parties very much. He said that he will continue to work, in no case will not go. We left him alone, and he was bored. And someone on the Mail.Ru code before leaving. And Mikhalych decided: “Why not update Mail.Ru while everyone is resting?” Well, he rolls, everything falls and breaks. We learned about what happened in the bus. They lifted Mail.Ru with the help of the wife of one of our employees: he gave her text commands to her, and she sat at a computer at home.

Natalia Troitskaya, event director of Mail.Ru Group

2002/2003.

In 2002, we started video chats right in the office. I was a moderator, I met stars. They came to our office, sat down in a chat room, and since there were very few questions from users (not like now, of course), we asked on-duty questions from a prepared list for all occasions: “How do you feel about hamsters? Do you like hamsters? ”

^{Boris Grebenshchikov in the office Mail.Ru, 2002}

Then Asya Labunskaya, our event manager, brought Zhirinovsky to the office on video chat. Everything went as usual, and only Vladimir Volfovich was about to leave, as enterprising Asya, without thinking, stopped him and asked him to congratulate her on the upcoming wedding. And she didn’t stop there: Asya recorded the whole video and then showed it to relatives at the wedding party. Fortunately, the record is preserved.

In 2003, we had a birthday that coincided with Halloween . Then we did everything ourselves, with our own hands. The director of special projects went to the market, bought pumpkins, brought them to the office. We started to cut these pumpkins ourselves. And left them at night as decorations. In the morning we arrive - half of the pumpkins are eaten, in the remaining rats sit.

About the office on Pushechnaya they have already told a lot, but I will add more. It was very hot there because the building was old, and for the first time we were not allowed to install air conditioners. They saved themselves very simply: they put a bucket of water near the workplace and thrust their legs in there.

Lyubov Shokina, HR Director, Portal Direction

2009-2013

Once I stopped a plane at Sheremetyevo. We flew to some kind of conference. Roman Kokhanovsky was supposed to fly with us, but he got stuck in traffic. It was necessary to solve the problem: without Roma, there was no point in flying. At first I ran to the representatives of Aeroflot, they said: “We cannot help you with anything. Find the main who is engaged in registration ". Naturally, I found this person, walked around him and did not allow him to close the registration. They tried to put me on a plane, but I waited for Roma Kokhanovsky and could not get away. Drawn time as she could. As a result, the registration was delayed for half an hour: just as much Roma got to the airport.

The elevators were small and old, and were constantly stuck. The staff on the elevators went to the dining room, which was located on minus the first floor. And when several people got stuck there, including Boria Nikiforov, he shouted: “Why have you all eaten so much that the elevator cannot lift you? Why was there so much, and why were you all crowded here? ”The employees were locked up for about an hour, because there was no person serving the elevators in the business center, and they had to wait for help.

To park the car, it was necessary to arrive at work at eight in the morning, otherwise there was no parking space to be found. All my scratches on the car - because of this spontaneous parking. Once Kolya Kondratov (he had a hefty jeep) parked in someone's car - he did not notice how he got in the rear bumper of another car.

When it became really bad, we shot a huge hangar, which was located 15 minutes walk from the office, but it looked like a horror movie.

The Hi-Tech Mail.Ru project in Avion sat on the ground floor, next to the dining room. And there they did not have a special place for tests. At some point, I go to their department and see Boris Nikiforov lying on the floor and waving his hands. It turned out it was another game on the Nintendo Wii, and they tested it that way.

When girls came to them, they were asked: “Do you want to play Wii?” - “We want”. And then they were offered a task where they had to lie on the floor and swing their arms.

Conclusion

We did not find where to insert these photos in the text, but you just look! November 2004. Dmitry Grishin (CEO of the Mail.Ru Group) and Anna Artamonova (Vice President, Head of the Mail and Portal business unit) award the 20 millionth Mail.Ru user. Give her a car.

And the summer corporate party of 2005. Dmitry Grishin and Anna Artamonov on quad bikes at a party in Hawaiian style.

And now we have moved to a new office, a 27-story tower (with a five-story underground parking), we have no annoying neighbors, and the issue of food is decided by our own restaurant, Starbucks in the office, a fresh bar and thousands of fruits and cookies.

We have excellent data centers, and no one else drenches water so as not to burn near the server. And sometimes right in the office they bring us a pool with balls so that there is nothing more to be desired.