As a hardware monkey for the Mozilla infrastructure we have spent a lot of time together. Ever since I gazed my eyes on your cheap rack equipment I knew… I knew it was going to be a rough relationship. Right off the bat, things went fast, we spent long nights together screwing in rails so your slick DL360 G4 could fit snugly in its new home. From there, I looked forward, thinking the worst was over and we would move into a life of happy server and admin. But then you disappointed me again, your drive bays slide around smashing the LEDs that make the disks blink. What is a server with out blinky lights!? It is just … just… a piece of expensive metal! I wanted to blame FedEx, and we tried… but having this happen to 5 of our 14 shipped servers was more than a coincidence, it was just bad design.
I wanted to end it and go back to my ex, Dell, but at this point we already had so much time and money invested we just had to make this relationship work. Looking for anything I could to forgive you, I called…. and surprisingly…. you made the sun shine again. We talked for hours discussing broken backplanes and possible reasons for obscure posting patterns. You named me all the things you would do for me and even gave me your email and phone number. I felt like it was our first date, you know, the one where I got to open your top and look at the 1U of shiny heatsinks, fans, and scsi controller. Hope was renewed and I charged back to the co-location to solve our problems once and for all. I scribbled down the serial numbers of the damaged servers and ran back to the phone. We talked again and you told me everything was going to be OK, I would have new backplanes by tomorrow.
HP, we have been through a lot by now — and honestly I don’t know what to feel anymore. Soon I will have the promised backplanes in hand and we can get everything back to normal. But still, it will be hard to forget the nights of our physically broken infrastructure. If it wasn’t for your support I don’t know if we would have made it. I ask that you do your best to not to hurt this relationship again, and I will do my best to keep you away from FedEx.
Love,
-Alex
