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Re:The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operatin... by bee_rider on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @02:13PM (#40055333)
Were some of your servers in lead-lined coffins while others weren’t?

Jokes aside, that it seems really unlikely that cosmic rays would be clustered past, like, a couple hours, right? It isn’t like some neutron star is, like, tracking your server as the world spins (well, I hope not, I mean who’d you piss off for that to happen?).

Anyway, this fits my totally unscientific expectation that cosmic rays are just sort of like an informal description of hardware bugs that nobody can reasonably find beforehand. A server that seems to be hit by lots of cosmic rays probably has a dodgy connection somewhere inside it, but I mean maybe it’s the RAM, swap that out or replace it… but maybe inside the chip SOC, so what are we going to do, bust out the electron microscope to check all those connections?

Re:The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operatin... by toast0 on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @02:54PM (#40055814)
You'd have to ask our host; these were all rental dedicated servers, none of us ever got to see them at all. Pictures of their racks never included coffins though. I don't think we pissed anybody off enough for them to get out the cosmic ray gun, but I'm also thinking the people we did piss off didn't have cosmic ray guns anyway. ;)

In terms of diagnostics, we pretty much just asked for ram replacement, if that didn't work, cpu replacement, if that didn't work, motherboard replacement. If that didn't work, the chassis / rack position is clearly cursed, don't give us anything there again, please. :D I don't know what they did with the hardware we didn't like, maybe send it to the manufacturer, maybe give it to customers they don't like, maybe surplus it.

Re:The legal rule that computers are presumed to be operatin... by naasking on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @12:01PM (#40066538)
Yes, these kinds of error rates almost certainly indicate either hardware faults of some kind, unshielded electrical noise, or possibly poor cooling pushing temps past the stable operating range.