Use an Old Linux Computer to Put your Baby to Sleep | Hacker News Reader

Use an Old Linux Computer to Put your Baby to Sleep

labnol.org

35 pointsnoaharc11 comments

That'll work for a while. Then the kid's going to be up half the night recompiling his kernel.

I can't find the link, but I remember reading an article a while back about utilizing the opening/closing of the CD drive to manually push the reset button on a server.

It was a sysadmin's story of how one of the servers needed a manual reboot every so often and it could only be done with someone physically being there to push the reset button. He set an old computer up with the CD drive directly facing the server's reset button. From there, he set up a cron job to send the "eject/close" command remotely whenever something went wrong with the other server.

Story ends saying that they no longer use that server, however that other computer just sits in the corner, faithfully ejecting/closing its CD drive to this day. Hopefully someone here can provide the link :)

That was a lesson from The Daily WTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx

He probably has to buy a new cdrom drive every second day.

instead of two eject commands (eject and eject -t, as prescribed in the link), you can also use eject -T (this will toggle between open and close) :)

aah the baby rocker one lined

    while true; do eject -T; done;

Just to set the record straight, it could be done with any *nix-ish OS such as BSD or OSX.

Very clever hack :)

What a waste of power.

Nonsense. Anyone who's ever experienced a cranky child and a wind-up rocker would gladly sacrifice a few kwh's for some peace and quiet! The fans in that old beast probably provide some nice soothing white noise as well.

I myself collect usb cdroms that no longer read correctly for use as impromptu servos. You just never know when you're gonna need your linux box to pull a latch or give something a nudge.

Edit: Oh... Or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868523

Psst don't tell Arrington. The "crunch-monitor" would be more than I could handle.

It's a Mythtv box. There's good chance it's always on.

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