Server Build and Install

blog.mojeek.com

9 points·Sami_Lehtinen··5 comments

Just saying. The decision is cost vs effort vs time to recovery. We dont build. Its a toss up between keeping spares of everything and next business day warranty. We went for the warranty. But we keep spare disks and switches. I'm totally curious about the servers that didn't work out and building your own with the parts you wanted...shouldnt there be any number of systems integrators who will build to whatever you like?

It's a long story and not completely the integrator's fault but in the end we had to replace all of the memory. Since then we have stuck to the same part manufacturers where possible. We don't know whether we've just been lucky or simply haven't reached a critical mass where it becomes a common problem, but it's been extremely rare for a part to arrive in working order and go on to fail within the warranty period. Maybe that's a testament to Supermicro, we have had some problems with their power supplies but all sometime after the warranty period has ended.

Reading this gave me PTSD flashbacks of sleeping on datacenter floors doing grueling build outs. I can (kind of) appreciate saving money by building these servers manually but the work is so terribly boring.

Plus, doesn't self building these boxes put the liability on the company rather than the manufacturer? If a server dies, you can't just rma it in this case, no? The ability to just box up and rma a server was something I loved as dcops.

We (Mojeek) got our first batch of servers complete and it didn't work out so since then we have built them ourselves with the parts we want and that have been reliable for us.

It's an exciting time for us so it wasn't boring, but ask again after the next few hundred and you might get a different answer.

Glad you're having fun with it. Congrats on your success so far!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com