mouse not pictured

Got my hopes up for nothing!

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.

Optical or roller ball?

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 exactly self-hosting, but I’ve worked at two different academic labs that had unique issues and small budgets.

The first was on top of a mountain at 3km elevation. The low air pressure meant that all hard drives had a lifespan of no more than a year before starting to have issues. This was in the pre-SSD days. The “solution” was to boot from a floppy, never compress data, and have a student return the drives to a low elevation and swap them for the prior ones every six months.

The second was at a place that was using old Datacube MaxVideo hardware that we would never have the budget to replace. It would crash if the room temperature got above about 18C, so we set the thermostat to 15C. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you’ve tried sitting at a desk for 8 hours where everything is 15C and the heat is just slowly leaving your body into the chair, the desk, and the keyboard. And then you walk outside where it is 32C and instantly start sweating because you’re still in several layers and fingerless gloves.

I had a screen get burn in (forgot to turn it off, oops) removed it from the laptop, waited 3 days, put it back in and it was flawless again.

I had a laptop that refused ethernet and would only ever use wifi… When the ethernet was connected. No wifi unless that cord was connected. Confirmed it was, indeed, wifi by using a dummy connector.

Bought a 10tb hdd that refused to read anything at all, opened it for giggles/curiosity and found a piece of scotch tape stuck to one of the disks and one of 4 disks completely shattered. The disk was still factory sealed (by appearance, anyways; they still had the antitamper stickers)

I dunno if that counts or if it’s the weirdest cause I rarely have any issue, but one day, I wanted to deploy speedtest tracker via docker on my 1st NAS…

So I tried, but it didn’t work (I forgot the reason). So I try to check the logs, but it turns out my NAS was insanely slow.

When I rebooted it, it couldn’t stop beeping and telling me there was a hardware problem, so I tried everything I could do to fix it, but nothing worked, so I ended up reinstalling the whole OS

Keep in mind this was the cost to see I had a bad result at the speedtest lmao 😭

Btw, I also lost all my important files, yayyy!

I do not care to admit how many times when I was first getting into home labbing that I could not figure out why I could not reach a pi or the internet. All because I either killed an SD card for pihole or just plain out forgot to put one in!

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

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.

The mouse did not survive interrogation. Also mouse not pictured.

I thought it was the huge heat sink that looks like it extends past the side plane of the cover. Reminds me of something I did with a CoolAir Cosmos tower. I mounted two 300 cfm fans over each CPU and took the side panel, neatly cut out the area around the fans, then 3d printed a scoop, with a slot for filtration, to fit on the side panel and allow the fans to breathe.

No mouse problem, but I’ve had to take measures to prevent cat-related downtime. Cats and power-button at the top is not a good combination.

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.

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.