[HECnet] No connectivity to arsgea 4

[Dave McGuire]

On 1/23/21 11:54 AM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
> Well, as a matter of fact, I myself told myself this, based on my 
> anecdotal experience of 45 years in the field.

   In that case, please stay far, far away from soldering irons. ;)

> Even with moving parts, 'professional' equipment will typically last 
> longer than consumer.  I have a highly venerable IBM X8668 server from 
> about 2000 that is fine, yet it has moving parts; a six drive RAID 5 and 
> the fans.  Those drives have never broken; I think we've had to blow out 
> a fan.

   Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

   A funny story about that.  In a large ISP environment in the 
mid-1990s, suits smelled money and started infiltrating the company.  Of 
course, the predictable thing happened, everything went to shit.  Part 
of that process, though, was amusing.  The suits whined and whined about 
"all of these overpriced Sun Microsystems computers that we've never 
heard of". (we had over two thousand of them at that point)  They whined 
that a PC costs $300, so why should we be buying $15,000 Sun computers?

   So they started buying PCs, just a few, maybe a dozen.  The $300 
price they'd mentioned before was for eMachines garbage at Best Buy, but 
what they actually ended up buying were monstrous $20,000 Compaq 
ProLiant machines.  About 25% of the computing power in 5x the rack 
space at a higher price, wow what a great decision!  Idiot suits.  At 
least they didn't break very often...only about twice as often as the 
SPARCs.

   So they quoted what they COULD spend on PC hardware, but not what 
they DID spend.  That's suit logic for you.  The company is not long for 
this world when processor architecture becomes a business decision.

   Of course the new carpet-bagger VP's whole family suddenly went to 
Tahiti for two weeks after the Compaq sales guy landed the sale, so we 
knew what had transpired.

> However, I should qualify this with the fact that the unit was almost 
> never shut off ever for over 12 years and was on a triply redundant 
> conditioned power supply during all that time.  So, no power up flexing, 
> Etc.  As a matter of fact, any machine that I care about here is on a 
> conditioned power supply (at least an APC Smart UPS).  My remark might 
> have been better put in that context; the power up surge flexing is what 
> eventually will do anything in.

   That's a good approach.  The power-up surge flexing, as you aptly put 
it, is damaging to this type of hardware.  However, just plain age, when 
it comes to components, is the larger problem as things start to get 
very old.  I know this from learning about how the components actually 
work, but my repair area's trash can, chock full of failed capacitors 
and 7400-series ICs, is literally a bucket of data in support of it. ;)

   We have quite a lot of very old computer hardware at the museum, and 
we repair and maintain nearly all of it.  I've been repairing stuff all 
my life (I bought myself a new bike as a kid by fishing broken TVs out 
of dumpsters, then fixing and selling them), but that really kicked into 
high gear with the construction of the museum.  As far as failure modes 
in electronics, I think at this point we've pretty much seen it all over 
there.

> To be fair, you're not the first person who has retorted to me about my 
> squatness with regards to electronics, my brother (who does the hardware 
> support) being very high on that particular list.  I'm quite happy 
> (often delighted) to blithely reply, "Yeah...  They don't do much 
> without me programming them, do they?"

   ROFL!

             -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA