Hey y’all! Recently my homeserver (an old laptop) has started crashing every night (after weeks of uptime just working), without anything useful in the logs. Any suggestion about what it might be? (Just started logging battery info to test tonight)

  • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
    36·
    2 days ago

    I don’t know the root of your ills on your server, but I have an interesting story to share (shared by my husband who was an engineer at the company mentioned below).

    Back in 1998, the engineers at Be,Inc (who were developing BeOS, a beloved OS at the time) were experiencing kernel panics right after 7 am, on a specific computer. All of the crashes at around the same, while the computer was running tests all night. It had become a big mystery because they couldn’t find the bug.

    It took them days, but they decided to sit around at 7 am to see what was happening. They saw that a single, strong sun ray was entering the room from the window, and was directly hitting the PC’s floppy drive (the PC was not completely closed up with its cover, since it was a test machine). They found that the sun ray would alter some bits in the electronics and what not, and would crash the kernel! :o)

    • paper_moon@lemmy.world
      101·
      2 days ago

      I’ve got a fun one to share from my college programming professor. Similar situation, they had a machine that kept locking up, and this was back in the days of huge mainframes the size of rooms. So they call the repair tech from the manufacturer.

      So the repair tech shows up to the office gets the run down on what’s been going on, and goes out to his car and brings in a huge piece of wood and just starts wailing on the thing as hard as he could. The whole office was freaking out thinking this guy had lost it, and he later explained that the memory was a grid of magnetic coils, and the coils would rust and the rust shavings would fall between the coils below, corrupting the memory bits. So he was shaking them loose by slamming the machine with this piece of wood. Lol wild times.

      1000013393

    • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
      51·
      2 days ago

      That’s a great story, thanks! Old electronics were particularly sensitive to light and other EM disturbance 😄

      • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        1·
        20 hours ago

        Still are, though most often it’s heat rather than photons from sunlight since it’s not really necessary to disassemble hardware to that extent these days. And there’s available processing power to retry or do other error handing for any interference. Like running an unshielded Ethernet cable through a wall next to a power cable or through a room with heavy machinery can definitely cause data corruption from EM interference, but it will likely manifest as slowness rather than crashing a whole system. But there are lots of things that still cause computers or applications to crash that are related to stray energy, we just are so used to buggy software now that it rarely is noticed. 😁