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Comment by kapone | Hacker News Reader

> It's putting a longer server in the rack above/below yours and pushing the power plug out of the back of your server

Are you serious? Have you ever built/operated/wired rack scale equipment? You think the power cables for your "short" server (vs the longer one being put in) are just hanging out in the back of the rack?

Rack wiring has been done and done correctly for ages. Power cables on one side (if possible), data and other cables on the other side. These are all routed vertically and horizontally, so they land only on YOUR server.

You could put a Mercedes Maybach above/below your server and nothing would happen.

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Yes I'm serious. My managed host took several of our machines offline when racking machines under/over ours. And they said it was because the new machines were longer and knocked out the power cables on ours.

We were their largest customer and they seemed honest even when they made mistakes that seemed silly, so we rolled our eyes and moved on with life.

Managed hosting means accepting that you can't inspect the racks and chide people for not cabling to your satisfaction. And mistakes by the managed host will impact your availability.

I hope that "managed host" got fired in a heartbeat and you moved elsewhere. Because they don't know WTF they're doing. As simple as that.

We did eventually move elsewhere because of acquisition. Of course those guys didn't even bother to run LACP and so our systems would regularly go offline for a bit whenever someone wanted to update a switch. I was a lot happier at the host that sometimes bumped the power cables.

Firing a host where you've got thousands of servers is easier said than done. We did do a quote exercise with another provider that could have supported us, and it didn't end up very competitive ... and it wouldn't have been worth the transition. Overall, there were some derpy moments, but I don't think we would have been happier anywhere else, and we didn't want to rent cages and run our own servers.

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