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.