No, not the game Second Life, but trying to give a second lease of life to old abandoned hardware. Recently I noticed a big bunch of IBM blade servers lying round, dismantled, and stacked on the floor. I thought it would be good to take over them and use them for some student projects. So I went around to seek blessings to officially hijack the blades. I didn’t really know what was in the blade, or their hardware configuration, and…
I’ve been a MySQL user for a long time. But since many years ago, I’ve been thinking about switching to adopt PostgreSQL, partly because how it looked like MySQL was headed toward commercialization (and indeed as we all know now they are owned by Oracle). What attracted me to PostgreSQL was the relative purity and completeness of its SQL implementation, and lesser sense of commercialization in its project.
We bought a brand new branded computer. It came from a reputed brand vendor (or also called a system integrator). We would expect it to come with brand new components. One of them was a branded hard disk. The hard disk died. That’s nothing too unusual. Hard disks are one of the most likely components to fail because it is a mechanical part. However, we were in for a surprise when we removed the failed hard disk to do a…
One of my servers died recently. A few days prior to that, there was something very odd with its clock, which was stuck between 03:14:31 and 03:14:35. Then on its last day, it suffered a kernel panic. After a hardware power cycle, the server never came back up. It’s like it suffered a heart attack, and CPR and defribillation failed to resuscitate it.
Well, my fingers were itchy, and I wanted to test something out. Something that carried a small but inherent risk of mucking up. I was careful, no less, to make sure there would be no mistakes, no typos. In fact, I wrote a “rollback” script to undo the changes after a timed delay, just as a precaution. So, even if the changes mucked up the system, the changes would be automatically rolled back anyway. Then, how about testing this rollback…
A computer science student saw this, and asked if it was a mainframe computer. I was almost going to burst out laughing, but managed to hold myself together. I’m sure most of you know it is not a computer at all. This 1.7m high contraption is an isolation transformer. At least you should be able to tell it is some kind of a transformer, right? I just thought to myself that, my goodness, our students don’t even know how a…
