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Mar. 29th, 2005 08:06 pmToday was an...interesting day. Partially because I got to spend half of it in techie hell, and the other half in techie heaven. Since I'm not much of a computer guy, the heaven part was wasted on me, while the hell part was still hell. So it goes.
This morning I was taking apart cases. The problems with that I blame on the defense department, who probably dumped their computers on us. It's impossible for a defense group to keep track of all it's computers. Hell, I'm going to have about a thousand computers, with probably twice that many Processors, in about three months. Do you think I'm going to notice if one of them does the lightfingers tango out the door to China and leaves a dummy processor in its place? Hell no. In fact if I ever do find myself missing a compute node I'll probably blame it on maintenance and write it off as a loss. Not to mention that it makes no sense to hide computers like ours from China. Oh crap, China could learn how to build nukes! Oh wait, they already have nukes. No, the real threat is smaller nations, who can pay some janitor enough to steal one of our compute boxes with its valuable, data-bearing, hard drives.
So they came up with a defense mechanism. They made it physically impossible for a nation with the technical and manpower limitations of, say, North Korea or Cuba, to remove the goddamned hard drives from the case!
First you have to open the case. There are two tiny, nearly invisible screws, that hold the case shut. To find them you have to look very carefully because they are painted the same black as the case. No normal Phillips screwdriver will turn them though, you have to get one of those tiny screwdrivers that looks like you're going to break it when you use it. Once you've gotten the lid off, you are confronted with a jungle of cables. I've seen bad cabling jobs before, but these boxes have half a dozen fans, each of which needs a separate power connection; and they're all tangled together. Normally this sort of job requires a party of a dozen men with machetes and a native guide who knows the territory, but I managed to do it with a blowtorch in about half an hour.
Then you've got to remove the hard drives. The hard drives are screwed in to the equipment bays by four screws. This looks okay, until you realize that the equipment bays have been placed so that there is only about two millimeters of space between the screw head and the nearest wall. So much for inserting a screwdriver in there. You have to remove the entire equipment bay. This requires removing enough screws and miscellaneous mounting pieces to build a fully functional armored car. Then you're fine, unless you want to remove the second hard drive, which is in a bay secured in place by a group of nuts that have been purposefully designed to be totally inaccessible without first removing the bay. Which you can't do without removing the nuts. There is a way to remove them using a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a lot of patience. However it is much quicker to simply use a brick of C4 to blast the hard drive bay free of the case. After that using a crowbar and sledgehammer usually allows you to extract the hard drives themselves.
So that was my morning. Then in the afternoon I got to see the inside zone of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which has so many equipment racks in it that you can actually lose sight of the entrance and exit. Once again, I'm not much of a technical person, but I was impressed by some of the signs that they have hanging over various clusters. I'm sure that IBM's 1.1 Teraflop grid makes for a hell of a Counter-Strike game. And I have no idea what we do with 60 PBytes of storage space.
Anyway, I believe I have expunged the traces of nerdiness from me, I can continue my more mundane life.
Bah, whatever.
This morning I was taking apart cases. The problems with that I blame on the defense department, who probably dumped their computers on us. It's impossible for a defense group to keep track of all it's computers. Hell, I'm going to have about a thousand computers, with probably twice that many Processors, in about three months. Do you think I'm going to notice if one of them does the lightfingers tango out the door to China and leaves a dummy processor in its place? Hell no. In fact if I ever do find myself missing a compute node I'll probably blame it on maintenance and write it off as a loss. Not to mention that it makes no sense to hide computers like ours from China. Oh crap, China could learn how to build nukes! Oh wait, they already have nukes. No, the real threat is smaller nations, who can pay some janitor enough to steal one of our compute boxes with its valuable, data-bearing, hard drives.
So they came up with a defense mechanism. They made it physically impossible for a nation with the technical and manpower limitations of, say, North Korea or Cuba, to remove the goddamned hard drives from the case!
First you have to open the case. There are two tiny, nearly invisible screws, that hold the case shut. To find them you have to look very carefully because they are painted the same black as the case. No normal Phillips screwdriver will turn them though, you have to get one of those tiny screwdrivers that looks like you're going to break it when you use it. Once you've gotten the lid off, you are confronted with a jungle of cables. I've seen bad cabling jobs before, but these boxes have half a dozen fans, each of which needs a separate power connection; and they're all tangled together. Normally this sort of job requires a party of a dozen men with machetes and a native guide who knows the territory, but I managed to do it with a blowtorch in about half an hour.
Then you've got to remove the hard drives. The hard drives are screwed in to the equipment bays by four screws. This looks okay, until you realize that the equipment bays have been placed so that there is only about two millimeters of space between the screw head and the nearest wall. So much for inserting a screwdriver in there. You have to remove the entire equipment bay. This requires removing enough screws and miscellaneous mounting pieces to build a fully functional armored car. Then you're fine, unless you want to remove the second hard drive, which is in a bay secured in place by a group of nuts that have been purposefully designed to be totally inaccessible without first removing the bay. Which you can't do without removing the nuts. There is a way to remove them using a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a lot of patience. However it is much quicker to simply use a brick of C4 to blast the hard drive bay free of the case. After that using a crowbar and sledgehammer usually allows you to extract the hard drives themselves.
So that was my morning. Then in the afternoon I got to see the inside zone of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which has so many equipment racks in it that you can actually lose sight of the entrance and exit. Once again, I'm not much of a technical person, but I was impressed by some of the signs that they have hanging over various clusters. I'm sure that IBM's 1.1 Teraflop grid makes for a hell of a Counter-Strike game. And I have no idea what we do with 60 PBytes of storage space.
Anyway, I believe I have expunged the traces of nerdiness from me, I can continue my more mundane life.
Bah, whatever.