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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

One of the most famous quotes was about a server that is online and pings, but the sysadmin doesn't know anymore where it physically is.

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Yes, it is this one:

<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20230610235249/http://bash.org/?5...

Gotta use audible pings and leave the PC speaker plugged in haha! Many network devices have a "blink management LED now" feature for the same reason.

There was a lab I hung out in back in college. The nature of the room and the devices that we had in there, there was 10bT, 10b2, and 10b5. Twisted pair, coax, and thick.

The someone had what was termed "the connector of evil". Apparently coax and thick had the same signal... just thick was more rigid about where you connected into it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap ). The connector of evil looked like a 10b5 terminator on one side and 10b2 on the other... and passed the signal between them.

When adding another computer onto the 10b2 segment, we would invariably disrupt the wave in the wire and some devices would drop off.

The trick was to have each machine ping -f one of the systems on 10bT and redirect its output to /dev/audio. If the machine was making noise, it was good. And so then we'd fiddle with different lengths of coax between the T connectors until everything was buzzing away.

Ah, I probably missed it because we had the following dialogue at the office.

    <senior-sysadm> Hey bayindirh, is the log server up?
    <bayindirh> *SSHs to server* Yes, it's up and running nicely.
    <senior-sysadm> Where's that thing in the system room?
    <bayindirh> *Scratches head* Umm, I don't know?
    <senior-sysadm> Go find it, we'll upgrade it to newer HW.
    <bayindirh> Uh, OK. *leaves desk to dig the system room*.

P.S.: I'm the one who installed that server physically and configured it in the first place. :D

I once resolved a similar situation by having the PC speaker play the simpsons theme song.

Funny, we used to do the same with random pcs in our lab that people would setup and forget about. We used the Duke Nuken 3D theme song from when the game first loaded.

Ah the fond days of being able to identify a machine remotely by ejecting its CD-ROM drive.

You mean the cup holder?

Happened to me recently when moving. Couldn't find one of my zigbee temperature sensors, but it was still reporting information diligently, so it had to be somewhere in the house. Took about 6 months before I found it.

Where was it?

Anticlimactic, partly unpacked moving box. I was mostly surprised it was able to re-join the mesh while being in a completely different spot, something that a lot zigbee chips struggle with.

I’m reminded of the time I dropped a Juul behind/beside a makeshift workshop table and it magnetically attached itself a foot or so below to the freestanding metal shelving unit directly next to it.

I don’t advise using Juul products for this and other reasons.

You didn't set each room on fire until you found it?

Famously it ends with the server being behind drywall or something after some construction project.

Also known as "the mexican cartel".

I'd love to find the contact details for this old server I used to use. It's been online continuously since 1996 and I know the first name of the guy that has it, but I don't remember his last name. Shit, the server hardware might even be mine, I don't even remember. I can't even remember if it is Linux or *BSD at this point.

http://resworld.eolith.net/staff.html

The email address is no use as that is my domain name and I dropped it in like 1997 o_O

Dustin: if you see this I would love to pull my DMs off Resworld :)

And decades before the Raspberry Pi.

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