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I had to search the reddit commits for 'vmotion'. They have it covered. This anecdote is an amazingly good story for telling at the pub over a few beers. It's
by digitalsushi 6y ago
I had to search the reddit commits for 'vmotion'. They have it covered.
This anecdote is an amazingly good story for telling at the pub over a few beers. It's a terrible story for a strategy.
If this is a mountain, my molehill is that one night in the late 90s, I got paged cause the SMTP outbound server was overheating. At midnight I drive across sleepy NH backroads, and stopped at a Wendys to get a chicken sandwich and iced tea, for the caffeine.
When I got to the server room, I pulled the 2U Dell server out of the rack and discovered the CPU cooling fan had seized up. Mind you, this is a New Hampshire data center in 1999, and it has a filing cabinet with manilla folders, and carpeted floors. This thing was never prepared for any disasters.
A half hour later, the SMTP server was up and running cool again.
I greased the fan with the mayonnaise from my sandwich.
- dsr_ 6y agoThe (probably soybean) oil is a fine lubricant, but the constant motion should cause the egg proteins to coagulate. How long did it operate before you replaced the fan properly?
- emeraldd 6y agoI can't help smiling at this analysis. It feels like something you'd hear from a sci-fi story engineer working on an rundown ship that just keeps going no matter what ...
- staticvoidmaine 6y agoThat book is Expeditionary Force
- novaleaf 6y agobooks 1 to 3 are awesome. after that the author forgets how to advance the plot while still churning out a new book more than once/year. I gave up on book 7, so yeah, I tried sticking with it.
- munificent 6y agoSo you're saying the plot seized up and the author wasn't able to engineer a solution?
- novaleaf 6y agoIn the forward of one of the books the author mentions he quit his day job after the first book was a hit, so I can understand his financial need to churn out more books. Unfortunately there is little plot advancement, perilous situations more contrived, and needless exposition/filler the norm.
- treeman79 6y agoExpeditionary is my cleaning audiobook. As in, if I’m cleaning and have nothing else interesting to listen too. Some occasional good laughs. Dinosaur holding a plunger badge. :)
- ndesaulniers 6y agoThat or he too ran out of mayonnaise.
- gknoy 6y agoThat feels like the Honnor Harrington series to me. :-( I thoroughly enjoyed the first N books I read (5? 6?), but the next one or two seemed like watching a series TV show that never resolves tension points, because if they did there'd be no reason for Season N+1.
- ethbro 6y agoI read the first 100 pages of the first book and then literally threw it into a fire. I believe the "Nope" sentence was something akin to "{character} thought that {thing} because {thing}." Jesus Christ. Would it kill you a little to show instead of tell? (And lest people believe I'm not a fan of some good * opera, I'm not ashamed to admit I've read my fair share of BattleTech, Barsoom, and even Lost Fleet, among less highbrow works)
- garettmd 6y agoWell thanks for that recommendation. Added to my reading list
- wojciii 6y agoI'm reading the series to the end no matter what.
- kijin 6y agoThe egg proteins are already quite coagulated. I'd be more worried about the vinegar component. You need to neutralize that acid with something.
- dsr_ 6y agoThe egg proteins are coagulated but dispersed in the colloidal solution. The motion brings them out of solution. You can try it at home by warming up some mayo in the microwave and then rubbing it between your hands: you'll get a stringy oily mess.
- asguy 6y agoTo play this discussion out further: it depends on the heat and it depends on the motion. I’ve made plenty of Hollandaise (which is a sibling of Mayonnaise) in the blender with “boiling” butter poured in, and it stays quite hot... especially when it continues to warm on the stove top. If I microwaved it from cold, it would break almost instantly.
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoHaha :-), I want this dialogue performed in Space Janitors or something of the sort
- tzs 6y agoIt's also got corn syrup. Would that cause any problems for this application? Here's the ingredient list for Wendy's mayo: Soybean Oil, Water, Egg Yolks, Corn Syrup, Distilled Vinegar, Salt, Mustard Seed, Calcium Disodium EDTA (To Protect Flavor)
- cnasc 6y ago> It's also got corn syrup. Would that cause any problems for this application? Over time, the server would expand to be 4U rather than 2U
- Corrado 6y agoIt probably lasted long enough to get a replacement fan installed the next morning.
- stronglikedan 6y agoWhy would it need to be replaced now that its working again? ;-)
- eigenvector 6y agoThat reminds me of the time I found an appropriately shaped bolt installed in a fuse-holder - presumably someone did not have a replacement fuse and improvised. Except that it had been 5 years since the last maintenance in this place and it was a protection panel for a large synchronous generator in a power plant. After you make a heroic temporary fix, please, ensure the permanent fix is applied later!
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> After you make a heroic temporary fix, please, ensure the permanent fix is applied later! I've known people who would, depending on exactly how bad the failure was, outright refuse to apply temporary fixes precisely because they didn't believe that the business would fix things properly if the issue wasn't forced. And having watched how that particular company handled things, I can't say that they were wrong.
- dylan604 6y agoThere's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
- vangelis 6y agoIt's a slow blow
- shuntress 6y agoI've seen it said on this forum before and it also aligns with my experience: Most fixes that are 'just for now' are actually 'forever'
- coding123 6y agoMaybe it was vegan mayo? Oh wait, 1999.
- tempestn 6y agoReminds me of the foosball table in our old engineering students' society room. You can buy special lube for foosball bearings. OR you can just rub popcorn butter on the bars. Guess which one we had in ample supply.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI’ve once used cooking oil as a thermal paste substitute. Worked well enough and nothing went wrong.
- unlaxedneurotic 6y agoThat sounds too close to a fire hazard
- CydeWeys 6y agoI doubt there's any component in a PC getting remotely close to the ignition point of oil (which for canola is 424°C). Plus, it's going to be a minimal amount of oil. I'm more worried that the oil won't get to a high enough temperature and thus won't polymerize, so it'll flow out and ruin some other component, or go rancid, or something. Thermal paste won't move on you. Oil will.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zhengyi13 6y agoOil will certainly move on you, but it might not destroy your components, depending perhaps on the specific oil chosen: you can actually buy or build fully oil-cooled PCs. https://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php https://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php as an example.
- ponker 6y agoThat's mineral oil, not cooking oil. Mineral oil doesn't go rancid.
- Scoundreller 6y agoPresumably there’s enough surface tension from both sides to hold it between the gaps and resist gravity (if it’s a vertical CPU). Pretty much any Solid-liquid-solid or solid-solid-solid interface will be better than solid-roomTemp&Pressure gas-solid. The whole point is to conduct heat better than air, and most things will.
- Spooky23 6y agoThe real lesson is that the teller of the tale sort of did initally -- fire the customer. If the story is true, the client is a stereotypical know-it-all small business owner who gets by on bullying. You see them frequently in businesses that pay low-skill workers a small premium that is hard to replace. (ex: cleaning services, pool guys, mechanical contractors that do low-end maintenance work, etc) As a contracted SME, taking a job like this is dumb. The chances of failure, where "failure" == the server going down is high, and the customer will just stiff you.
- donmcronald 6y agoI deal with a fair bit of customers like this (not via my business), enough that firing them all isn’t an option because it’s a large portion of the market where I am. It’s something. They’ll have low end servers with no redundancy, terrible or no backups, and no contingency plans for anything. They won’t spend a nickel and are the most likely to lose their minds if anything goes wrong. It’s so frustrating and stressful.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoSeems like some dedicated hardware here would make this go faster if there's a business for it. For example, if the bandwidth isn't high, you could setup a wireless mesh from point A to point B and connect via some appliance to the NIC. Walk the length with the appliance and verify there's no dead spots, then just hook up to a power supply and get things done.
- Bnshsysjab 6y agoIn the 90’a wifi was even more of a trash fire than it is today.
- eldavido 6y agoThis is why services like Google Apps or managed exchange hosting exist. Most people are terrible at IT management. So bad they're far, far from realizing how bad they even are. When you consider you're getting like 1000 of the smartest tech people in the world to manage your infrastructure for you, for $5/month per user, it's really such a no-brainer. If people are too stubborn to see that, or want to waste time trying to do it better themselves "because it's cheaper", with redundant power, OS patching, zero-downtime changes/deploys, proper capacity planning, proper redundant connectivity, provisioning the right network around it, physically securing the server room, ensuring things are properly cooled, not wet...I could go on forever, and this isn't even the main focus of the business...I'm sorry, but they deserve go to out of business. I had a very stubborn client once who ran a hotel chain. Won't say what or where, but I wasn't surprised when their random "security through obscurity" VNC server got compromised. I wasn't finishing migrating to the new PCI-DSS compliant system we built, either, so there go 5000 credit cards "encrypted" with some sweet rot13-level bullshit in Turbo Pascal I cracked in about 30 minutes with no code access.
- jjice 6y agoI'm a young developer, so I've never had the chance to work with on prem servers (and the chances that I will are looking slim), but I've always loved these "war" stories.
- laurent92 6y agoIn my former service company, the story of the server room which has become much much more important and reliable with massive investment like a diesel generator, but the teams haven’t grown enough in maturity. One day they have a problem with a server. A system admin is granted permission to go to the bay, since remote desktop didn’t work. They discuss the problem in front of the bay. One leans on another bay that was just between two locations. Wheels weren’t locked. It just flew across the room. It was ok, just the power cord and a fee RJ45 torn. No serious damage besides downtime.
- jacobsenscott 6y agoI miss the days when the servers came with seating (Cray).
- mike_d 6y agoYou can buy yourself a pair of old Dell servers from craigslist or eBay for a few hundred bucks. With a $200 membership to VMUG Advantage you'll get all the licences you need to build an enterprise grade cluster. Build yourself a home lab and learn how systems work. Figure out what is really running your code. Learn how to resource optimize. Don't end up only being able to work on webapps and small datasets that fit comfortably in the cloud.
- jjice 6y agoThat's been a plan of mine. Right now, my home server is just a Pi running SMB and Jellyfin, but the plan is to expand into some used hardware. Seems like used server hardware is one hell of a deal.
- aeyes 6y agoI'm not sure if this is still valid advice. I'd just stick 64GB of memory in a desktop PC and have the home lab running on VMs. 5 years ago I left a company running loads of enterprise software and web applications for other companies in a couple of data centers. We had well over 10.000 physical machines. When I left, about 90% of the workloads were virtualized. Running on bare metal is the exception today. Sure, its cool to have hot-swap HDDs, hot-swap PSUs, redundant network cards and a remote management board but none of that is rocket science. You can learn it in a week if needed. Networking is a much deeper topic yet almost nobody would recommend you to set up a couple of switches and hardware firewalls in your home network. Today you expect that the hardware just works. In the real world it is extremely complicated to correctly design and run networks, but you aren't going to experience any of these problems in a home lab.
- y_tho 6y agoIt´s 2008. A manager that just doesn´t care anymore tells the new IT person to replenish the fan mayo. -"Why? I don´t know why. It just works." -"Is Hellmann's ok?" IT person documents that Hellmann's is preferred.
- bentcorner 6y agoAnd then later on Hellmann's is discontinued, so the company solicits quotes for a mayo supplier.
- redler 6y agoSurely it would be an RFP that insists on SLA guarantees, generating profound confusion at Hellman’s and Kraft.
- m3kw9 6y agoMayo is around 1 part water to 1 part oil ratio..
- arexxbifs 6y agoMayo usually has around 80% fat content.