Of Home Labs and Commercial Ventures

Hannibal Datacentre: “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the servers?”
Sysadmin: “Yes.”

When I was in pre-sales, a common description was “sweating their assets”; referring effectively to budgetary pressures resulting in keeping equipment for longer than you might have otherwise preferred. Sure, the equipment is 5 years old, but the refresh budget got diverted to $newProject so it’ll have to wait another couple of years.

But, speaking from personal experience, sweating the assets takes on a whole new meaning when we’re talking about our home labs. So, a few weeks ago, I was enjoying my first coffee of the day around 4am on a Saturday morning my $otherBrand lab server started screaming from the garage. And screaming is the only way I can describe it. It turned out one of the fans failed, and the other was trying to break the sound barrier in terms of hitting some magic cooling number that it couldn’t attain.

Which, all things considered, I can’t complain about, given I bought it in 2014.

Servers being servers, a quick look at spare parts told me it was going to be expensive to fix – and it had already given me a few scares last year, resulting in buying a second server, in this case an old PowerEdge T620. So, off to eBay it was to buy a replacement second-hand server and finally admit I’d sweated everything I could from the $otherBrand server. This time I really scored — a PowerEdge R730xd in excellent condition.

Fast forward to Friday afternoon and prepping for our transition to solar power, I had to briefly shutdown the servers and … iDRAC failure in the T620 when it restarted. Goes with the territory of buying second hand of course, and I’d restarted the server dozens of times since I purchased it. Now, that doesn’t prevent the server from running, but it does mean it has to run the fans at close to full pelt since it can’t sense the onboard system status. So, back to eBay, this time for a replacement iDRAC unit and the hope that I, the luddite hardware guy that I am, can perform surgery on the T620 and install the replacement iDRAC to get it up and running. Until then, it remains safely shut down.

Now, on top of that, one of my Synology NAS units broke down a bit over a week ago, too. Again, I can’t complain, since that was 11 years old – but, since that’s the home of my backups, it definitely needed replacing. After all, a backup expert without backups? That would be a true oxymoron.

So that’s two servers and a new NAS over the course of the last twelve months – and in reality, most of that concentrated in the last few weeks.

For the most part, my home lab supports my blogging and self-education.

Anyone who has followed my blog would know that it’s hobbyist. Sure, it’s aligned to my career, and yes, as an author I’ll sometimes point to copies of my book that are available for sale. And perhaps a good example of hobbyist is that the blog has definitely taken back seat for much of this year – hobbies can only consume so much time when you’re busy with other things, like moving, grieving, and working long hours.

So imagine my surprise after running this blog since 2009 to log in and find out that Jetpack had unilaterally declared my blog to be a commercial one, and as such, were demanding payment of $155 a year to get access to my access statistics. And, after going around in circles, the closest I can determine is that since I’ve had the audacity to point to my publisher (and in the past, Amazon) for people to find copies of my book, that makes me a commercial venture.

Jetpack are entitled to do what they want, of course. After all, they’re a commercial venture. But I’m also entitled to do what I want too, and that includes a very large middle-finger to Jetpack for opaque and unchallengeable declarations. I’ll source my stats via other means – and then the yearly fee comes around for my Jetpack site backup, well, I’ll look at other options there as well.