Boby

Just about 17 years ago, a couple coworkers and I decided to put a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge 2650 on the roof. Why? Because we were curious, and it was to become scrap metal. We did absolutely nothing to weatherproof it, beyond setting it on two bricks, facing it away from the prevailing wind, putting a drip loop in the cabling, and using fiber networking so we wouldn't fry anything if it got zapped. Ran Linux, plotting its own sensor data via ipmitool, and presenting it via a web page served from the box itself. We put load on it using SETI@Home. It ran for about two months up there, even surviving 6" of snow, until a really gnarly thunderstorm drove water into the SCSI backplane and it shorted out. Continued running for a few more weeks, though, until not being able to write to disk was finally too much. Did not come back from a power cycle. Its hostname was Tevye, of course.