Mastodawn

bauspanderu Mar 12

Matthew Garrett

Way back in the day a friend had to move an Apple Xserve across London to get it racked, and because massively rich South Africans are stingy with money he couldn't expense a cab so took it on the underground and someone looked at him, looked at the Xserve, looked back at him and said "That's a fucking big iPod"

@mjg59 I hope the friend replied:

It's the #iPodPro with Terabytes of Music!

#Xserve #Aplle #iPod

@kkarhan @mjg59 TBs of storage would be nice... the ones at a previous job had a pair of 500G ATA(133?) drives that seemed to be rare as hen's teeth!

@spk @mjg59 not as rare as you may think.

I have one as well somewhere...

Ryan Finnie Mar 12

@mjg59 Go on, ask me about the massively rich South African in question and the incident with the Dells he got off ebay and had us put into production.

Matthew Garrett Mar 12

@ryan Ryan, tell me about that incident

Ryan Finnie Mar 12

@mjg59 Okay, so when I was there in ops, we ran a bunch of private OpenStack clouds. There's MAAS (metal orchestration; should have been a component of OpenStack itself instead of NIH, but that's another gripe), and at the time we were almost exclusively an HP shop, but he wanted to dogfood MAAS with a variety of hardware.

The sane thing to do would be to set up contracts with manufacturers and give the hardware to a development and QA team. What he instead did was go on ebay, buy two random rackmount servers each from three manufacturers (can't remember the other manufacturers but the Dells survived as the internal meme mostly because they were basically broken), and had ops deploy them to a production OpenStack cluster. And ops was responsible when inevitably nothing worked right.

Matthew Garrett Mar 12

@ryan Oh god the iDrac bullshit I hit when I was in Openstack space was ridiculous, I can't imagine how bad it was with whatever random servers had fallen out of ebay

Ariadne Conill 🐰

@ryan @mjg59 man when I was still involved in Debian and Ubuntu and shit, I thought they had state of the art hardware

now I learn they do the same shit I do, smh

Ryan Finnie Mar 12

@ariadne @mjg59 Go on, ask me about the pandas.

Ariadne Conill 🐰

@ryan @mjg59 the what

Ryan Finnie Mar 12

@ariadne @mjg59 Put it this way, for most of the 2010s, we had a moin page called WhichArmsSuckTheMost. It documented all the random assortment of slapdash ARM hardware which all the porting/building efforts ran on. I can't remember the exact words, but the intro was something like "all of them suck, but some less than others".

At one point the closest thing to sanity and stability we had were PandaBoards with custom enclosures, but they still sucked. But the page grew about a hundred panda gifs, and led to official documentation about how to stab the pandas when they misbehaved.

Sorry you're learning how the sausage was made.

Marcin Juszkiewicz 🙃Mar 12

In 2014 I during FOSDEM I got a sick idea of squeezing many SBCs into server case to have them racked.

Heard stories that someone took it serious and built rackcrap full of Pandaboards...

@ariadne @mjg59

Janne Grunau Mar 12

@hrw @ryan @ariadne @mjg59 I’m aware of a rack mounted cluster of 16 to 20 BeagleBoards. It’s possible that a certain swedish troll was aware of this beagle cluster but if I had to guess it the predates 2014

Wouter Verhelst Mar 12

@hrw
At work we have 5 rpis as part of our CI system in a 2U rack mount for the things that can fit up to 12 of them...

https://racknex.com/raspberry-pi-rackmount-kit-12x-slot-19-inch-um-sbc-207/

(Not sure if that's the exact model, wasn't involved in the procurement of them)
@ryan @ariadne @mjg59

Raspberry Pi Rackmount Kit | 12x Slot | UM-SBC-207 | racknex

Mount twelve Raspberry Pi's in the 19 inch server cabinet. With the Rackmount Kit UM-SBC-207 you create order and overview in your rack!

racknex SHOP

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@ariadne @ryan @mjg59 Reminds me of how frequently corporate had somewhat worse hardware than I got at home.

see shy jo Mar 12

@ariadne @ryan @mjg59 regret to inform you that the first computer I booted the debian installer on had a cardboard box for a case

Ariadne Conill 🐰

@ryan @mjg59 @joeyh I was more referring to canonical IT but 😂

see shy jo Mar 12

@ariadne @ryan @mjg59 and famously, master.debian.org used to be under someone's desk

endrift 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 12

@mjg59 I...I guess so?? I'll allow it

@mjg59 could the South African be? 🏸

Conny Nasch Mar 12

@freshstart 🤔 🤣 @mjg59

highvoltage Mar 12

@mjg59 If both were still made these days... he probably wouldn't be wrong either

jmcnamara Mar 12

@mjg59 I had a work colleague who in their first job in the 80s had to transport a hard drive across London. It was the size of a briefcase and was only in megabytes. He went by Underground and when he arrived the drive had been wiped by what he presumed was electro-magnetic currents. They used taxis after that.

Trammell Hudson Mar 12

@mjg59 if you try hard and believe in yourself, every computer can be a portable computer

Nils Goroll 🕊️

@th @mjg59 first thought: "oh, more servers for #codeberg"

@th @mjg59 Indeed. A few years ago this made the rounds in Switzerland.

Juho Mäntysalo Mar 12

@Kensan @th @mjg59

Everybody knows CRT is superior to all other common alternatives for monitor technology. ☝🏻

Trammell Hudson Mar 12

@Kensan @mjg59 I guess the No Computers sign looks more like a desktop PC than an iMac.

@th @mjg59 Those pictograms always looked like a Nokia N900 to me.

@th @Kensan @mjg59 why does this output 160V @ 15Hz? which appliances work feom that in the first place? (laptops might, with a wide enough wallplug?)

Colin Watson Mar 12

@mjg59 Damnit I just told the same anecdote independently.

I thought the speaker was Jeff Waugh rather than a random tube denizen, though.

Andreas Kupfer (🖖)Mar 12

@mjg59 back in the day a bunch of Germans had to move a server to a new data center. To not lose it's 7 year uptime, they decided to do it online by using the subway. (Audio in German only)

https://youtu.be/vQ5MA685ApE

Moving online webserver using public transport

YouTube

JulianCalaby Mar 12

@mjg59 I recall seeing a video of some crazy guys who hooked a server up to a UPS and a cell phone, unracked the whole mess onto on a trolley, then took it across the city by train so they could move it between two datacentres without any downtime.

And of course I can't find the video now.

Simon Bisson Mar 12

@mjg59 I did the same with a Cisco router back in the early ISP days of the mid 90s; I had to get it from Shepton Mallet where UKOL was based to Park Street where we had our first POP. Took up a whole seat on an InterCity 125...