Way back in the day a friend had to move an Apple Xserve across London to get it racked, and because massively rich South Africans are stingy with money he couldn't expense a cab so took it on the underground and someone looked at him, looked at the Xserve, looked back at him and said "That's a fucking big iPod"

@mjg59 Go on, ask me about the massively rich South African in question and the incident with the Dells he got off ebay and had us put into production.

@ryan Ryan, tell me about that incident

@ryan @mjg59 man when I was still involved in Debian and Ubuntu and shit, I thought they had state of the art hardware

now I learn they do the same shit I do, smh

@mjg59 Okay, so when I was there in ops, we ran a bunch of private OpenStack clouds. There's MAAS (metal orchestration; should have been a component of OpenStack itself instead of NIH, but that's another gripe), and at the time we were almost exclusively an HP shop, but he wanted to dogfood MAAS with a variety of hardware.

The sane thing to do would be to set up contracts with manufacturers and give the hardware to a development and QA team. What he instead did was go on ebay, buy two random rackmount servers each from three manufacturers (can't remember the other manufacturers but the Dells survived as the internal meme mostly because they were basically broken), and had ops deploy them to a production OpenStack cluster. And ops was responsible when inevitably nothing worked right.

@ariadne @mjg59 Go on, ask me about the pandas.

@ryan @mjg59 the what

@ariadne @mjg59 Put it this way, for most of the 2010s, we had a moin page called WhichArmsSuckTheMost. It documented all the random assortment of slapdash ARM hardware which all the porting/building efforts ran on. I can't remember the exact words, but the intro was something like "all of them suck, but some less than others".

At one point the closest thing to sanity and stability we had were PandaBoards with custom enclosures, but they still sucked. But the page grew about a hundred panda gifs, and led to official documentation about how to stab the pandas when they misbehaved.

Sorry you're learning how the sausage was made.

@ryan Oh god the iDrac bullshit I hit when I was in Openstack space was ridiculous, I can't imagine how bad it was with whatever random servers had fallen out of ebay

@ryan

In 2014 I during FOSDEM I got a sick idea of squeezing many SBCs into server case to have them racked.

Heard stories that someone took it serious and built rackcrap full of Pandaboards...

@ariadne @mjg59

@hrw @ryan @ariadne @mjg59 I’m aware of a rack mounted cluster of 16 to 20 BeagleBoards. It’s possible that a certain swedish troll was aware of this beagle cluster but if I had to guess it the predates 2014

@mjg59 if you try hard and believe in yourself, every computer can be a portable computer

@mjg59 Damnit I just told the same anecdote independently.

I thought the speaker was Jeff Waugh rather than a random tube denizen, though.

@ariadne @ryan @mjg59 regret to inform you that the first computer I booted the debian installer on had a cardboard box for a case

that person was right though. someone should've made the xserve the size of an ipod instead. would've solved everything. the london underground passenger would've gotten on with their day, your friend wouldn't have been visibly suffering, and apple would've invented something useful

@ryan @mjg59 @joeyh I was more referring to canonical IT but 😂

@ariadne @ryan @mjg59 and famously, master.debian.org used to be under someone's desk

@mjg59 I did the same with a Cisco router back in the early ISP days of the mid 90s; I had to get it from Shepton Mallet where UKOL was based to Park Street where we had our first POP. Took up a whole seat on an InterCity 125...