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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

There's a picture of the rack from 2009:

http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg

I think the big reason Theo doesn't want to ship this offsite is that it's a lot of old/esoteric equipment that often times needs physical TLC in order to make it run properly, or has weird boot requirements, interfaces, etc.

They still have m68k, VAX, and Alpha boxes that are at a minimum 10 years old, that they build the OS directly on all the time.

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There's also the possibility of critical failure from transport. Old hardware can wind up as a sort of brittle "dead man walking", where even the slightest unpleasantries in a shipping container kill it for good.

Wow, that's a pretty sketchy looking "machine room". Wires dangling everywhere, and it looks like a tinderbox (cardboard lying around, wooden beams overhead....)

It's also very typical for machine rooms in academia in my experience (the MIT AI Lab had one that looked far worse than this, and others in the same building were similar). [Well, minus the wooden beams, but aside from that...]

Business are typically a little better (IME), as they tend to have a bit more money, but sometimes barely. Once you get to giant Google-scale outfits, of course, the game changes completely...

Let's not forget, the value of meticulous organization and cable channels and generally creating cable pr0n is related to the number of racks being managed. In this photo... 2 racks.

I've spent time in dozens ... maybe hundreds of server closets in academia/companies that have been around for a few decades, and this is easily on the very, very clean side. When there are no rewards for cleaning up and every reason not to mess with something that works, little tends to be done on the aesthetic side. Ask me sometime about the server closet for a group that aggregated hundreds of remote telemetry sensors... by per-sensor dedicated copper lines that had been around since the 70s.

It's a bit surprising considering OpenBSD's rigorous insistence on correctness.

That's nothing.

I went in a BIG well known UK hosting company DC (which we colo'ed in) back in 2003 and they had racks of machines sitting on top of books on the bottom of comms racks rather than proper racks. We had to get a DL380 out from underneath a pile of 5 others. Not as easy as it sounded.

Cables everywhere. Power cables taped to everything. Total mess.

OpenBSD one is bliss.

The worst I ever saw was at a govt site, where you could not see a single inch of floor space, for the tangled mass of cables that ran across it. They had laid scaffolding planks across the top of the sea of cables, to walk on.

It's Theo's basement.

You know that photo is from Theo's basement, right?

here is a more recent photograph: http://www.openbsd.org/images/newrack.jpg

On the RHS of the image, between the 2 sun boxes labelled "2" and "3" there are 2 clamshell devices.

Does anyone know what those are please?

http://imgur.com/6v2RiCK

netbooks, by the looks of it

http://www.openbsd.org/zaurus.html

Yes I was surprised how many platforms they still support http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html similar to NetBSD.

Since OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD, this makes sense.

Well historically sure, but I didnt expect them to maintain them...

Some of those old boxes (particularly the SGI and Apple X-Serve) are so well designed!

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