Oh man. Once, when I was a young padawan doing maintenance by myself on one of our three racks in a colocation DC, I dropped a 1U server from about 2m/6ft high. It was scary as hell. While trying to grab it I hit the off button on one of the other servers, causing an outage for about 50 customers. What's more, it fell on the floor and just missed the SAN with the spinning disk array at the bottom of the rack. Everyth…
I’ve had old drives that a bit of a whack on the side have given them the kick to start working again (such that you can get data off)
Pretty funny to see this video at the top of HN! My kids still think I'm an idiot for not having somehow parlayed the enduring popularity of this video into being a YouTuber -- despite my protestations that I was merely the videographer here. If anyone is curious about the video's origins, I had a fun conversation about it with Ben Sigelman a few years ago.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IYzD_NR0W4
Heard about this on the Changelog podcast recently, great interview!
Pretty funny to see this video at the top of HN! My kids still think I'm an idiot for not having somehow parlayed the enduring popularity of this video into being a YouTuber -- despite my protestations that I was merely the videographer here. If anyone is curious about the video's origins, I had a fun conversation about it with Ben Sigelman a few years ago.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IYzD_NR0W4
I'm with them on this issue! Go for it. You have a platform, man. :-D
I have a colleague who was on the on-call rotation for some of our systems hosted in a datacenter our company owned. During this rotation he got unlucky in that the datacenter detected fire and decided to disperse gas that displaces oxygen (I think it was Halon gas?). Those systems are no joke - you have a short warning before you are supposed to put on a mask or get out of the server room otherwise you will just suf…
spinning hard drives of the pre-helium-filled generation are not in fact totally sealed. if you disassemble one you will find the tiny air filter module which covers a hole in the casing for equalizing pressure with the outside air.
I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that argon is heavier caused the failure. Argon gets into the drives, assisted by the larger pressure outside of the drive at the time of the release, and it wouldn't come out within a reasonable time even when the pressure came back to normal, since there's not much capability for venting gasses out of the hard drive. And since argon is significantly heavier, it causes larger air drag on the mechanical parts of the drive, eventually making the head driving coils too weak to operate at the needed speeds.
I think Brendan is still peeved that this video is his most viewed video on Youtube even after all this time.
Yes, whilst he has given so many other valuable talks around systems profiling, etc.. I firmly believe that this [1] still should be hanging in every system administrators bedroom around. https://www.brendangregg.com/Perf/linux_observability_tools....
I think mcelog/rasdaemon deserve a mention there in the RAM section?
Oh man. Once, when I was a young padawan doing maintenance by myself on one of our three racks in a colocation DC, I dropped a 1U server from about 2m/6ft high. It was scary as hell. While trying to grab it I hit the off button on one of the other servers, causing an outage for about 50 customers. What's more, it fell on the floor and just missed the SAN with the spinning disk array at the bottom of the rack. Everyth…
I’ve had old drives that a bit of a whack on the side have given them the kick to start working again (such that you can get data off)
Old grease, you probably broke the sticking just enough for the motor to overcome it and then after a bit of turning the grease warms up enough that it will liquify.
I have a colleague who was on the on-call rotation for some of our systems hosted in a datacenter our company owned. During this rotation he got unlucky in that the datacenter detected fire and decided to disperse gas that displaces oxygen (I think it was Halon gas?). Those systems are no joke - you have a short warning before you are supposed to put on a mask or get out of the server room otherwise you will just suf…
The shockwave from a sudden release like that can take out the better part of a raid array in a matter of moments. I never understood why they have to release it all at once instead of gradually because the number of times that I've seen accidental releases dwarfs the number of real firefighting incidents.