A rather popular site had gotten a donated, top of the line Compaq server system to run their operations; everything ran fine for the developers at home but whe

A rather popular site had gotten a donated, top of the line Compaq server system to run their operations; everything ran fine for the developers at home but when the server was sent to the DC there were all manner of transient bugs that couldn't be diagnosed. It went back and forth a couple times then they gave up on that one and acquired new hardware. I came to own the "cursed" server, and it ran fine for me for several months in heavy but noncritical tasks. I put it in my DC and sure enough the odd errors begin happening again. This was a 4U box with a row of drive bays in front and "onboard SCSI raid" and "hotplug backplane" and all those trimmings. So we had all been using the onboard built in SCSI controller this whole time, which included a large SCSI cable carefully routed through the folds and byways of this complicated case. That was the fault: the SCSI cable connector to the backplane board had cracked; and when it was cold pulled apart enough to have poor connections on some pins, and result in (sometimes silent!) data corruption problems. Getting to it required stripping the machine down further than anybody had managed to that point. After that it served me well for several more years.