I fixed a server with a precisely placed piece of tape (2023)

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110252202169575508

by Wowfunhappy • 2 years ago

90 52 2 years ago

social.treehouse.systems

gbolcer• 2 years ago

I came into a company once that had built their own server room. It had a couple hundred pizza boxes in it and was always hot as hell even with full blast air conditioning. When I retired almost all of them to use virtual servers, it turns out that 1) a lot of the chipsets internallyl still had plastic film on them (to prevent scratches? Why would you put film on them? There were even some CPUs that didn't have any coolers on them, just film) and 2) A lot of the inpflow and outflow air ports also had plastic shipping film that was never removed. I was completely shocked. So I fixed dozens if not a hundred computers simply by removing a piece of tape.

stavros3• 2 years ago

This wouldn't make the room any cooler, though, as the total energy used by the computers is the same. It would just dissipate the heat in the air, rather than keep it on the chips.

kelnos• 2 years ago

I don't think GP was suggesting it would. The bit about the server room being hot as hell was just to illustrate that these machines were running in a very hot environment without proper cooling.

smrq• 2 years ago

Presumably it would make it hotter, as the CPUs wouldn't have to throttle themselves so much, generating more heat.

alsetmusic• 2 years ago

One would think the fans wouldn't work as hard, but then again server fans might blast on full regardless. It's amazing that none of the machines / components overheated and failed.

Terr_• 2 years ago

This wouldn't make the room any cooler, though

I feel like that might be embedding some questionable assumptions, such as:

1. That CPU computing work completed is directly proportional to joules of heat emitted.

2. That stymied active cooling measures don't themselves generate heat, such as all the fan motors spinning at 100% and the AC/DC conversion to power them.

3. That even if performance was improved by removing thermal-throttling, demand would still push everything to run at full-tilt rather than allowing some machines to idle.

Wowfunhappy5• 2 years ago

There were even some CPUs that didn't have any coolers on them, just film

...I'm pretty surprised these systems booted at all without CPU coolers?

unsnap_biceps• 2 years ago

CPUs are very good about protecting themselves, but I'm shocked no one noticed that they took many hours to boot up or to do anything at all.

RedShift1• 2 years ago

Now's the time for the infamous Tom's Hardware video comparing a P4 to an AMD Athlon to see what happens when you remove the cooler...

abrookewood• 2 years ago

I had a Dell laptop that was always overheating. My son pulled it apart and found that the CPU had been put in place with the plastic cover on ... and thermal paste helpfully squeezed on top of that!

rty32• 2 years ago

What about using a relay as a temporary solution to remotely turn it off instead of physically yanking the cable?

Maybe that's good enough for them, people never touch this problem again, and we wouldn't have this story (which of course would be sad). But it occurs to me that the author wasn't in a rush to fix this and had plenty of time to poke around. I wish I could do that.

analog31• 2 years ago

Speaking as a "maker," you can find on AliExpress a fairly generic relay board that's controlled by a logic signal. That, and a cheap microcontroller board, are a super useful problem solver.

Havoc• 2 years ago

Currently on a mission to tape a bunch of gear too. Though to cover LEDs. Why does consumer gear meant for houses look like a disco at night?

Wowfunhappy5• 2 years ago

When I first moved into my studio apartment, I had a mission—no little lights! When I go to sleep, it should be completely dark.

Then I discovered that putting tape on my mouse's USB receiver interfered with the wireless connection.

Then I got a USB hard drive which has an LED along the top left corner, where tape won't stick.

Then I got a microwave which always displays the time when it's not in use, and if I cover up that display, I can't see the timer for my food.

And somewhere around there I gave up. It was impossible to tell before buying these products that they would come with lights, no one talks about this!

kroltan2• 2 years ago

That's exactly the advantage of sneakernet shopping, you can ask to see the product in operation.

spiffytech• 2 years ago

Let me plug LightDims: They're translucent stickers that keep LEDs from shining into the room, but still let you see the LED status.

Be sure to buy from the original family business, not the knockoffs.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CLVEQCO/

Tempest1981• 2 years ago

I used those to dim the "Passenger" seatbelt light in my old car. Maybe I put my backpack on the seat.

RunningDroid• 2 years ago

Non-Amazon link: https://www.lightdims.com/store.htm

Loughla• 2 years ago

I learned how to solder small connections just to bypass the LED's that are on every single piece of electronics anymore.

I don't need my house to look like a fucking carnival. Who does this appeal to?

schneehertz• 2 years ago

A fix without finding the cause cannot be called a fix

As the comments say:

Now waiting for the war story from your successor "you'll never guess what I found when I took apart this one server that wouldn't wake-on-lan"

tantalor• 2 years ago

You can "root cause" to any depth. The trick is to stop at some point that is fixable.

If the thing is broken because X then you can fix it by removing X. That's enough explanation. You don't need to know "why" for everything.

stephen_g• 2 years ago

Sounds like there was something wrong (at a hardware level) with the network card, so the real fix would be to buy a replacement.

But if disabling a faulty connection you don't need in the first place stops the problem happening, that's a decent workaround... I'd just be a little worried that something else could be faulty on the card if the WoL pin is glitching, so potentially you could have other intermittent issues.

worewood• 2 years ago

My 1070 is currently running with tape covering half of the PCIe pins so it works on x8 instead of x16.

One day it stopped working. During troubleshooting it would work only on a 10 year old PC I had lying around. The difference? Despite being full-size, the GPU slot on the old mobo was wired only for x8.

I reckon that the GPU die lost connection on some pins. Not worth fixing, x8 works fine.

I fixed a server with a precisely placed piece of tape (2023)

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