Comment by dlinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlinder | Hacker News Reader

I worked on a social news product and part of our look was to have an icon for every story - either an image pulled from the page, a user-uploaded image, or, in the case of Flash content (say, a video player), a screen capture.

We had it all up and running - loading the content, waiting for the player to initialize, taking the snapshot, generated sizes - on a windows machine when, one day, the request came in to migrate that machine to a VM. After the migration, things were fine - until we disconnected RDP. Snapshots were coming back at the right size, but totally white.

The eventual "solution" was a laptop in the engineering area RDP'ed into this VM to keep the snapshots from going white. It got unplugged one holiday weekend, earning it a red hand-sharpied sign - "PRODUCTION LAPTOP: DO NOT UNPLUG". It was unplugged again one fateful weekend, this time prompting a healthcheck to be written that looked for all-white images in its output.

That rig ran that way, I believe, until someone had the insight to make a second VM, this one RDP'ed into the first.

Turtles, all the way down!

That's awesome and the solution is not as uncommon as you'd imagine.

At "a large telecom" I used to work at, we had a specific process that handled billing that relied on a DOS application which was written targeting a specific modem's hardware. They'd tried to migrate it to something else for quite some time but the guy who wrote it lived in a different state and was let go from the company when we closed that site down and moved all of its equipment to Detroit. It ran on an old Compaq (not HP Compaq, Compaq) desktop PC and in 2014 or our VP received a frantic call that the drive had failed and the computer wouldn't boot (from a younger tech who was used to working on server class hardware). The code for this application had been lost forever and nobody had any idea how it actually worked but my understanding was that with it not functional, we were losing enough money to make it a "drop everything priority".

They brought the machine over to my building and the VP of my department called me to assist[0]. Sure enough, the system wouldn't even see the drive. It was at this point that I noticed three numbers with the letters "C", "H", "S" next to each. This had happened before, apparently, and someone discovered the BIOS battery had died. Thankfully, they were kind enough to put the drive parameters on a label for me. I popped into the BIOS, put 'em in and it booted. The computer remained powered on in the cubicle I repaired it in (just outside said VP's office) for a year until the dev team got around to modernizing the code.

[0] I was not a support person at this time but was in the past and it wasn't unusual for them to call me in on strange problems. I was also known for having recovered a hard drive with important data on it using the break-room fridge (though I'm not sure this VP was aware of that).

You sound like a kindred spirit. I have put hard drives in freezers to release stiction; I have baked motherboards in the oven to re-flow questionable solder. I wonder if anything in our kitchen is sacred! Sometimes I wish I had "MacGyvering goofy tech junk" as a full time job!

No doubt! Yup, I've done the oven thing, too (several PS3 motherboards as well -- used to buy 'em broken on Craigslist when there was a chance they'd be running older firmware and resell them).

Trick with the freezer hard drive: if you ever order perishable items over the internet, they sometimes ship in boxes with large bags of "blue goo". Pop those in the fridge and the next time you need to keep a drive spinning long enough to get one last copy out of it, sandwich it between two of those. They don't get cold enough to pick up condensation and short the drive and the blue goo keeps cool for a long time if the bags are large enough.

My father-in-law started calling me MacGyver in the late '80s when I repaired his CB radio using a ball-point pen and modeling cement ... The name stuck.

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