As Slim built a new team, head office sent him a server admin he described as “a guy who half-assed everything and cleverly managed to always figure out the laziest way to do something.”
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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laziest way to do something
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Worse than a normal drill: a hammer drill. To make the holes in a comm rack bigger to fit servers... in an active rack....
How the fuck did he think that was a good idea? I use one to drill through concrete.
You can tell he's an idiot because he was using a drill on a hot rack. The fact that an idiot fucked up harder than they needed to shouldn't be a surprise.
I've both done and seen some "creative" solutions here and there over the years, but that's quite an accomplishment. But you can't deny the results, very effective percussive maintenance.
Slim learned that the lazy admin knew about the too-small screw holes on the rented racks but left it too late to hire someone with the skills and equipment to rightsize them.
The lazy admin decided to do the job himself, but didn’t fancy doing it overnight as is sensible for this sort of dangerous job.
“He brought his own drill from home, threw a bedsheet over the top server so metal flecks from drilling won't go into it, and started drilling these rack holes during trading hours,” Slim told Who, Me?
To make matters worse – if that’s possible – the lazy admin set his drill into Concrete Mode, which in this column’s experience usually means the machine both spins the bit at furious speed and pumps it back and forth in a percussive hammering motion.
The result?
“EVERY. SINGLE. HARD DRIVE. DEAD,”
Wait so what happened? It doesn't sound like he was drilling directly into the hard drives. Is the vibration from drilling a hole in nearby metal really going to reliably destroy all of them?
HDDs consist of a metal disk spinning very fast with a magnetic needle held very close to it. Enough of a bump and the needle can run into the disk, potentially destroying both needle and disk in the process.
Hard disks, and not SSDs? Hell yeah. They're spinning metal/magnetic platters. Vibrations can throw them off balance and totally fuck up the platter.
Sounds like this was no standard drill... If someone took an impact hammer to a rack with spinning drive I'd imagine there would be few survivors
Many standard drills these days have a hammer drill mode that gives some rotohammer-like action when you push in while drilling. It's easy to leave this mode on if you're only ever driving screws, as you're unlikely to push hard enough to engage the mechanism. If you're an idiot.
Is this solarpunk?
How does he own these tools, not know how to use them while also working in a data centre knowing about the risks of doing something ljke this. This is stupid on so many levels. Based diyer i guess