GeekNights Monday - Server Room Cooling Adventures

MrPeriod

Tonight on GeekNights, Rym recounts server room cooling adventures. HVAC isn't really taught in most university IT programs, but it's often one of the first things you'll end up dealing with in the real world. Before that, we consider Lavabit's issues with the FBI and Adobe's CC security breach.

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HMTKSteve

Do they teach any sort of class on proper heating and cooling of servers? Most of the offices I work in have a special room just for the telecom equipment. A room that is monitored for humidity and temperature.

Just as high heat can damage a switch so can cold. We had one switch a few years back start to tank and it ended up being a case where one corner of the room had a draft from a badly installed 'through the wall' AC unit. It went under 50F in the winter and bad things happened.

The AC in a server room is not there for the workers. It is there for the equipment.

If there is no discussion of cooling/heating/environmental issues than that explains why so many of our younger engineers suck at circuit and equipment placement design.

Starfox

I don't think any amount of cold can hurt it:


Maybe water condensed out of the warm, humid air as it cooled?

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee)

Water condensation is a likely culprit, but it's also likely that the equipment wears out faster below a certain temp.

Coldguy

If you want streaming rig? Lordkat.com has a computer for the sole purpose is to stream from his main computer.

Banta

Rym would probably make a good lawyer.

Also, you guys made my friend's day by bringing up his inability to join the forum in the episode.

Omnutia

Really liked the episode. Going to try setting up SNMPD+Cacti on my test server for the hell of it but I need to work out how to set up separate /www/ folders on the same IP.

Apreche

Really liked the episode. Going to try setting up SNMPD+Cacti on my test server for the hell of it but I need to work out how to set up separate /www/ folders on the same IP.

It's called virtual hosts.

HMTKSteve

Really liked the episode. Going to try setting up SNMPD+Cacti on my test server for the hell of it but I need to work out how to set up separate /www/ folders on the same IP.

It's called virtual hosts.

That blog I host for you? Virtual host. Just like what Scott says.

ninjarabbi

Back in high school my teacher in Cisco Class showed us our school's server room. They were in the storage room of the wood shop class, covered in wood dust. I don't think it was air conditioned either. No wonder their servers kept crashing.

Anthony Heman

Wait wait wait wait... did I miss where they said this episode was a repeat? I thought we had already heard/read this Rym story somewhere before.

Rym

We talked about these kinds of issues, but the specific story there is new. That drama ended recently. I'm looking at the door behind which it all unfolded currently.

The time before, I mostly talked about how marijuana growers are the only non-HVAC people who seem to know HVAC...

ninjarabbi

You know, you could probably hide one of those self-contained grow boxes in a server room pretty easily.

Rym

You know, you could probably hide one of those self-contained grow boxes in a server room pretty easily.

Under the raised floor. You could even wire up the water and electric easily down there without anyone noticing.

Rym

To hide it, make wall of dead cable runs. No one in the world wants to touch an unlabeled dead cable run.

HMTKSteve

To hide it, make wall of dead cable runs. No one in the world wants to touch an unlabeled dead cable run.

Truth.

Bridger

There is another device out there that does things similar to the El Gato that you have. It's the Avermedia Live Gamer HD. I've been using it for about 6 months now and it's worked really well for me. The only difference is that it's an internal PCI-E card instead of an external USB box. It allows pass-through HDMI capturing and has hardware encoding (but I still use the superior x.264 codec in Xsplit). I definitely recommend it as the top product on the market right now.

http://www.avermedia.com/Product/ProductDetail.aspx?Id=571

Jack Draigo

I must say, as a prospective businessman these episodes about practical problems that arise with IT are great, as they are good lessons on how to handle situations most people might not think about, or in the case of the company featured, use an inelegant solution.