also mouse not pictured
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also mouse not pictured
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I've had a mouse burn my generator coils while going in while running
mouse not pictured
Got my hopes up for nothing!
I stared at that picture like it was a Where's Wally for like 10 minutes before I came to check the comments and saw this note in OP's message...
We are cut of the same cloth.
Itβs OK I gotchu

Fun fact - he's called that because this same thing happened to him with a dead mouse in the pc case.
Na, he was the mouse. There was so much RGB, this is what he became.
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.
Oh, good thing you wrote this. I'm about to give one of my printers away and there's still a pi inside
"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.
I used to have a Ryzen 2700X based system as a server. At the time (no clue if it's still an issue), there was a bug in the interaction between early Ryzen chips and Linux that caused the OS to lock up intermittently. I used a ATmega32u4 board to connect to the reset switch on the PC and as a USB device with a systemd unit that sends a ping to the board every 30 seconds. If the board doesn't see a ping for a minute, it reboots the PC. It was janky as hell, but it worked for 2+ years!
That reminds me of the old story where they positioned a PC opposite from the server and taped a pen to the CD drive so that opening the CD tray presses the reset button of the server. The PC would automatically detect when the server freezes and open the CD tray. Probably just a legend but still a great example for how a silly and simple solution that just works can often times be as good if not better than a sophisticated but over engineered solution
so you reinvented watchdog?
yes, it's a zip-tie-and-duck-tape watchdog that cost me $5
most BIOSes have it as an option though
I don't know about "most". It hasn't been an option on any of the consumer motherboards I've used in my homelab.
Optical or roller ball?
I have a strong suspicion that the answer is mammilion
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 on a computer but I had a JVC TV that started blanking a few times a minute whenever my dvd player was connected. Whilst trying to fix this I attempted to update the TV firmware. That didn't fix a thing but I noticed that the blanking went away when the USB drive with the firmware update was plugged in. So I just plugged a cheapo USB drive in and left it there for as long as I owned that TV and dvd player.
The backup server at my parents house really did not want to run. Something kept breaking to the point that no web interface or SSH worked. Now I'm not new to self hosting, so I ran my fair share of HDMI and USB cables across my space to debug something on my server. But at my parents place it's just that extra bit annoying, since I only bring my laptop. Finding a screen is doable, but the keyboard got me more than once. The only one they have kicking around has a freaking PS/2 cable... not even my salvaged backup hardware is old enough to support that. More than one time I had to wait for friends to get back from work so I could borrow their keyboard just to press 'any' key.
I decided to handle the issue by getting an IP KVM, which should help me deal with that, right? Wrong! I installed a new drive and that piece of hardware goes into some secure boot loop or whatever that is too fast for my KVM to turn on....
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 just wrote a comment about a very similar setup! Glad I wasn't the only one haha
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.
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.

They make sprung flip-top covers specifically for this reason. Itβs just a little adhesive square/circle that you stick over the power/reset button, and it has a flip-top that automatically springs closed again.
Back in the day of BBSβ 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.
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.
Way back in the olden days, we had a hard drive with out any backups go bad. I determined that it was the circuit board. So I took a working drive and basically connected the bad driver's platters to the working drive's circuit board.
It worked and I was able to back up the data and restore it on a new drive.
One day, our internet just stopped working entirely. Our ISP was fine, router good, but no outside connection and I couldnβt access local devices. I have two Unraid servers. I took a quick glance at them, they were powered on, all looked ok. I decide to power cycle everything. Still no internet. Then I realize that I can still access Google from my phone when on WiFi.. hmm. That would meanβ¦ an issue with pi-hole!
I begin to try to diagnose from my phone with a hotspot to my computer. Iβm getting warmer but some things just arenβt making sense. I go back and stare at the server running pi-hole. Then it fucking hits me.
I have the pretty odd and totally not ideal home network. I have plans to upgrade everything but currently I have two wifi networks tied to the same WAN. One network is run off of access points so I can get Ethernet to odd areas of the property. The Unraid server hosting pi-hole was connected to an AP and the Ethernet cable I used didnβt have a clip, so it just barely unseated itself from it, breaking the connection. The router+pi-hole config meant also breaking the internet if anything happened to pi-hole or that server. I swapped it for a better cable and it all instantly started working.
Spent that weekend sorting out the network so it doesnβt happen again. It was definitely a head-scratcher.
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.
Also mouse not pictures
I was frantically searching for it, then i opended the post to See if the comments found it ...
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.
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
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)