The one customer who showed me his 'server rack' was just a tower PC on a stack of pizza boxes

I went to this guy's house in 2017 to fix a network drop and he had three monitors set up in his garage, said he ran a small business out of there. He pointed at a dusty Dell tower on four stacked pizza boxes and asked if I could 'rack mount' it for him, I still think about that sometimes when I see real server rooms. Has anyone else had a customer call something a server that absolutely was not?

3 comments

3 Comments

hugo8251mo ago

I see it differently though... calling it a "server" might depend on what he was actually doing with it. That dusty Dell tower could have been running file shares or a small database for his business, which technically makes it a server even if it looked like a joke. The pizza boxes are just a ghetto cooling solution, not really part of the debate. Back when I was in college I ran a Plex server off an old Optiplex sitting on a milk crate in my closet, and it worked fine for three years until the hard drive died. Function over form, you know?

hayden4661mo ago

@hugo825 that Optiplex setup worked for me too until the fan gave out.

hill.andrew24d ago

Actually Plex doesn't need a whole server OS or anything, it runs fine on regular Windows. I used the same Optiplex setup but with Windows 10 instead of a server OS. Still counts as a server in my book even if it's not running Linux or whatever people think a server has to be. The hard drive dying after three years sounds about right for those old spinning disks too.