also mouse not pictured

😤😤😤

mouse not pictured

Got my hopes up for nothing!

For a while, the windows machine I was using kept randomly becoming unresponsive (both via network, as well as the keyboard+mouse) and I just could not figure out why. Everytime it did, I’d have to force a shutdown by holding the power button until it shutoff, then press it again to start back up. Sometimes this happened while I wasn’t home, so it had to just stay offline until I was.

I got sick of having to do this; so I replaced the power button with a transistor and a RPI. The PI would ping the server every 5min; if it failed to get a response 3 times in a row, it would trigger the transistor for 10sec, release for 3sec, then press and release again; forcing a poweroff then starting the machine again. It’d also write these events to a log file. I think it was around twice a week ish.

Never did figure out what the cause of the lockup was; but it stopped when I replaced windows with Debian.

Then you tell people about it on IRC and become known as “the dead mouse guy”.

But the maximum nickname length on the IRC server is limited, so you settle for “deadmau5” as your nick.

Optical or roller ball?

I hosted shit for about ten years before really understanding how local dns worked.

Imagine a primitive society that discovered literally every major modern scientific achievement, but somehow missed the wheel. That’s basically how my first setup went lol.

Back in the day of BBS’ my buddy had a wonky modem. If I picked up phone , pursed my lips and did a squeaky sound the modem worked and I could log into BBS.

“not enough space in the used server for a standard power unit”

I wanted to put a dedicated graphics card in there for interference experiments - but the server is, well, a server - and those high availability PUs are expensive and a hell to cable manage

But a Dremel I had at hand … And a second PU as well. Now my server has a second power unit which is only powering the graphics card and is short circuited to be always-on.

self-made problems require self-made solutions.

One day, our internet just stopped working entirely. Our ISP was fine, router good, but no outside connection and I couldn’t access local devices. I have two Unraid servers. I took a quick glance at them, they were powered on, all looked ok. I decide to power cycle everything. Still no internet. Then I realize that I can still access Google from my phone when on WiFi… hmm. That would mean… an issue with pi-hole!

I begin to try to diagnose from my phone with a hotspot to my computer. I’m getting warmer but some things just aren’t making sense. I go back and stare at the server running pi-hole. Then it fucking hits me.

I have the pretty odd and totally not ideal home network. I have plans to upgrade everything but currently I have two wifi networks tied to the same WAN. One network is run off of access points so I can get Ethernet to odd areas of the property. The Unraid server hosting pi-hole was connected to an AP and the Ethernet cable I used didn’t have a clip, so it just barely unseated itself from it, breaking the connection. The router+pi-hole config meant also breaking the internet if anything happened to pi-hole or that server. I swapped it for a better cable and it all instantly started working.

Spent that weekend sorting out the network so it doesn’t happen again. It was definitely a head-scratcher.

I got a little fanless atom PC from work that was being tossed because it “didn’t work.” It did work you would just have to apply pressure to it before boot because the CPU must have been coming unsoldered. I just stuck it on the bottom of like 30 pounds of gear and never had a problem.

Not selfhosting, but I remember standing in a server room with a hands’ width of water on the ground (and rising), and hastily shutting down servers where the water was already in the case. It were big towers (Compaq Proliant, if anyone remembers), and luckily the board, drives, and PSU were in the top part of the big tower cases, the drive bays at the bottom were empty.

We got all equipment out safely, and we did not get electrocuted, either. We left with the last equipment when the water level was approaching the knees.

At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box’s PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.

One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. “Must be a busted fan and that’s causing an overheating alarm” he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.

We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan… it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don’t exist there.

My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.

As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.

Goddamn I hate mice. I just had to tear out the entire contents of a combine cab to get rid of their piss and shit, and fix the wiring they chewed off.

Fail2ban crashing on 3 seperate days i tried setting it up then one day i did the exact same thing an it worked

it is frying here during summer in Australia. I have to buy a seperate airconditioner for the server room and pipe it into the intake of my home lab/nas so it would not shut down on me