[kjetijor]

An friend of mine had a similar thing, where desktop-box-turned-server essentially locked up after just over 24h of uptime. Solution: Outlet/timer-thing which cycled power around 2am when nobody were looking.

Similarly - there were some minor issues with the cooling for my compute cluster at my previous job, where it weren't really designed to function in climates which had temperatures that varied too much. Notably, it'd turn off the compressors on hot summer days and cold winter days. While waiting for the tech, tiny rocks found on the roof were used in conjunction with some tape to force the mechanical relays on while waiting for the techs.

http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~kjetijor/images/tape_rocks.jpg

[ajford]

A few years back, I was part of a group in the early days of commissioning a piece of research equipment that consisted of many racks of FPGA and GPU computing equipment in a specially modified shipping container. This thing was installed in a desert area, and had to be cooled by a couple of AC units.

The issue was similar. On nights where the temperature dropped too close to the dew point for too long, the units would freeze over. However, at the time, there wasn't any temperature monitoring. So someone figured out how to monitor the die temp on the FPGAs without changing the running code. Took them a few days. By the time they finished, someone realized they could tie streamers to the AC vent, which could be seen in the remote video stream.

Anyways, the fix was to connect to the network, switch the AC unit to fan only for a couple of hours, then switch them back on. If I remember correctly, it was like this for about 6-8 months before they finally had someone replace the AC system with a more commercial unit that could handle the condensation.