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German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

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Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#71

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

DanBC wrote: post #49
smoyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a limit to that buffering ... and if they can vent outside in the Spring and Summer, wouldn't that be even more efficient in the Winter?

I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful. This scheme takes hot air and either gives it some use - heating a room - or dumps it. Burying pipes to get heat from the ground is quite popular. This is just a version of that. I'm not sure it's as bad as the "green washing" that many companies do.

It's at least useful as the input to a heat exchanger.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#73

Post by chrisseaton »

DanBC wrote: post #49
smoyer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a limit to that buffering ... and if they can vent outside in the Spring and Summer, wouldn't that be even more efficient in the Winter?

I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful. This scheme takes hot air and either gives it some use - heating a room - or dumps it. Burying pipes to get heat from the ground is quite popular. This is just a version of that. I'm not sure it's as bad as the "green washing" that many companies do.

> I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful.

I've always wondered the same thing about cooling towers in power stations. Why are they cooling the water coming out of the plant? The whole point of the plant is to make it hot and then convert that to electricity - why on earth are they venting the energy like that?

Apparently it's to do with cooling it fast enough to create a vacuum to draw through more water.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#74

Post by bengali3 »

ntaso wrote: post #48

Munich - In the night of Saturday to Sunday, a special unit of the police raided the home of retired gardener Heinz S. to seize several cloud computers. Heinz S. allegedly participated as a volunteer to hide Piratecloud servers in Germany. "I just wanted some heat from the thing, I don’t even know what it really is", is the unlikely claim of Heinz S., who turned 76 this year. On Tuesday, he has to state his case in c…

virtual drug mules

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#75

Post by yc1010 »

adam12 wrote: post #64
yc1010 wrote: post #10

What about the noise? Servers can be extremely noisy, in a home environment they would drive the occupier insane (well unless they are deaf)

My furnace is pretty loud. I find it to be comforting.

I regularly construct/test/burnin Supermicro servers here in home office before sending them off for collocation

The noise is something else from just one server with the fans being especially annoying

In a datacenter environment a single rack makes a mighty annoying noise and vibrations.

I would not want to be living anywhere near a rack lol

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#76

Post by rhino369 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #73
DanBC wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful. This scheme takes hot air and either gives it some use - heating a room - or dumps it. Burying pipes to get heat from the ground is quite popular. This is just a version of that. I'm not sure it's as bad as the "green washing" that many companies do.

> I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful. I've always wondered the same thing about cooling towers in power stations. Why are they cooling the water coming out of the plant? The whole point of the plant is to make it hot and then convert that to electricity - why on earth are they venting the energy like that? Apparently it's to do with cooling it…

The turbine works because there is a pressure gradient across it. The hot steam rushes faster if the other end is colder.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#77

Post by kordless »

valarauca1 wrote: post #38
justinsb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than cracking the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, I think they're probably cracked the problem of deleting the keys when the physical security of the cabinet is compromised.

This doesn't solve the problem. Unless the cabinet is air tight, and uses a pressure sensor to detect itself being opened. It's "Is the cabinet open?" subroutine can be defeated by simply opening the cabinet where a sensor isn't located. Basically cut the sucker open on the side. :.:.: Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you…

No free heat for you.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#79

Post by api »

I could see actually this working at a larger scale -- e.g. put a server room in the basement of a low-income housing project in a place with cold winters like Chicago or Toronto and heat the building with waste heat during the chilly months. It'd also be worth it at that scale to wire the building for multi-homed fiber.

Can't see it being practical at small house scale, and there's also some big security issues.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#80

Post by mschuster91 »

valarauca1 wrote: post #38
justinsb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than cracking the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, I think they're probably cracked the problem of deleting the keys when the physical security of the cabinet is compromised.

This doesn't solve the problem. Unless the cabinet is air tight, and uses a pressure sensor to detect itself being opened. It's "Is the cabinet open?" subroutine can be defeated by simply opening the cabinet where a sensor isn't located. Basically cut the sucker open on the side. :.:.: Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you…

> Basically cut the sucker open on the side.

Fine, thin, looped resistance wire - if you drill or cut through it, its resistance changes (either to infinite in case of a clean cut, or a couple ohms in case of two or three shorted-together loop).

> Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you can open the cabinet, and "close" the cabinet from the sensors perspective while leaving it opened.

Use a Raspberry Pi together with a UPS-backed fiber modem and a cellular modem backup uplink in case someone cuts the fiber, and the threat is basically neutralized (okay, someone may jam the phone signal, but then again this can be detected by carrier loss).

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