My WAN connection would just randomly start losing packets and would not recover, not full disconnect just lots of retries. Didn’t impact LAN just WAN. Unplugged the cable or disabling then re-enabling the interface would fix it for a coupe of days to a week then it would come back.

Time consuming to diagnose as switching cables, ports, etc would require waiting days to see if it fixed it.

Eventually had the ISP come out and swap the fiber media converter and fiber integrity. But again it came back.

After several weeks I stumbled on a FreeBDS bug that was exactly my issue…I was running OpnSense and my gateway had I225s. Applied the scripts and it worked.

“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.

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

mouse not pictured

Got my hopes up for nothing!

Optical or roller ball?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I lost a raspberry pi for a couple months. Just couldn’t find the darn thing. It was working fine serving away.

Turns out it was in the basement. I forgot I moved it to be closer to my tilt Hydrometer.

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)

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.

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.

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.