DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I do this sort of thing way more often that I care to admit…

The story starts with a switch: a 3Com 3C16464A 12-port fast-ethernet switch for you bitheads in the audience. It has worked marvelously for a long time (at about 2% of its capacity given the 3x7r3m3 traffic levels I bring in, not) but recently developed ventilatory arrhythmia — that is, the fans started groaning like old men in traction — and eventually my initial solution, cranking up the volume on the stereo, was no longer appropriate.

It was apparent that the fan inside the switch had thrown a rod, or its engine block had cracked, or at the very least the head gasket needed to be replaced. And so, armed with my enormous knowledge of electronics, not to mention my fabulous track record with assembly and repair of machines of all sorts, I decided to fix it myself.

Of course, I called 3Com first to ask about a warranty replacement. The phone tech was cheerful and supportive, and managed not to burst into pitiless laughter as she informed me that the repair would take 45 days. She also said I could purchase an “advance replacement” for $300, which is about 4x what these 3C16464As sell for on Ebay. I declined.

My next step is the one I regret: I decided to repair the switch myself. So I spent an hour trying to figure out what brand of fan is used inside the switch: I quizzed three levels of support techs at 3Com, pored over 3com.com, and searched the web for a dozen combinations of relevant terms via Google. But ultimately I failed. And so I waited until the weekend, when I took the switch offline and popped the case open for inspection. Fan model numbers plus more research yielded the fan manufacturer’s site, and a half-hour after that I’d learned that the fans cost $15 apiece (I’d need two) and have to be imported. This was becoming expensive, but I reasoned that I could probably figure out how to wire a resistor inline with each fan to reduce rotational speed, quieting the noise.

I stewed for a few days on my plan.

I think my success as a software engineer is partly due to my belief, deep down, that I’m just a little bit smarter than everyone else. So, even though I thought it was fairly likely that I’d electrocute myself in the process of replacing these fans, I continued to stew, weighing the possibility of early death against the possibility that I had the soldering-iron chops to repair and even upgrade the switch.

Fortunately, my wife really is a little bit smarter than everyone else, or at least smarter than me, and she frequently spares me the absurd consequences of my conceit. She said, “Why don’t you just buy a new switch?”

The light dawned on me, like the morning, you know, just before sunrise. It took only a few minutes of digging to learn that NetGear makes fast-ethernet switches designed specifically for home offices, where noise is a concern: the FS-116 has an external power supply, and therefore no fan, and is therefore silent. I plugged it in yesterday and am absolutely loving it; I can now hear my firewall, previously masked by the eternal-train-wreck sound of the 3Com unit, and have already begun planning a fanless replacement, which of course I will design and build myself.

Jon Carroll: The American empire is beginning to die.

In completely related news, Americans buy SUVs to be safe, even though SUVs are capable of having accidents even without hitting anything. See the Frontline report, Rollover. (Soundbite: It’s a myth that SUVs are safer than cars. People in SUVs die just as often as people in cars; they just die differently. They are more likely to die in rollovers, and they are much more likely to kill other people.)

And still more: the American Journal for Public Health announces a study that concludes that restaurant portion sizes have grown over the past 20 years “in parallel with increasing body weights”. Here is the abstract: The Contribution of Expanding Portion Sizes to the US Obesity Epidemic.

Like Jon Carroll said, denial is the national creed. Driving your armored vehicle to the local burger joint for a super-sized dose of salted fat won’t kill you, and besides, you had a really hard day! If any of this was unsafe, people couldn’t sell it, right?

(Please excuse my sarcasm. I really do think the world is coming to an end.)

One of the things I do to keep the lights on is help run a busy consumer website. The site sees awesome, unreal spikes in traffic around the holidays. (Hint: it ain’t debris.com.) Traffic doubled on the night before Valentine’s Day, from our normal daily peak of about 4 Mb/sec to over 9 Mb/sec, causing some strain on our server network — the webservers would back up under the deluge of pending connections, and finally succumb to the load and die. If we caught them in time, they’d recover; if not, we’d have to send someone to the colo facility and kickstart them. We did some of each as we learned what the limits are. This hardware had never been pushed so hard.

Traffic declined after 11pm, but began to climb again early on Valentine’s Day. By 6am most of my team were glued to their seats, watching in disbelief as the MRTG graph showed our traffic climb past 15 Mb/sec, past 20 Mb/sec, to finally peak north of 27 Mb/sec. Imagine that: the site’s traffic had grown 700%.

We brought additional hardware online to help handle the torrent, but we still had occasional problems with webserver suicides. I drove the load-balancer for much of the morning, manually pulling a machine out of the server array when I saw it approaching redline. Of course, pulling a server offline causes the load on the rest to climb, in compensation for the lost machine, so this became a sort of dance, attempting to mete the load in the face of accelerating growth in page requests.

But we pulled it off. It was exhilarating. I commented at one point that I felt, while manually load-balancing traffic for multiple websites across nine servers of vastly different capacities, like I was conducting a symphony. A co-worker responded wryly that “herding cats” was a more accurate description.

I was flying home from Germany in January when I saw a passenger vomit all over the person sitting next to him. It was awful to hear the cough, the gurgling, the splash, and the horrified gasp of everyone in the vicinity. And it was worse to be trapped 10' away, breathing what I imagined to be Ebola Frankfurt, an airborne filovirus that would cause everyone on the plane to erupt into bloody geysers of sausage-smelling dissolved organs 72 hours later.

All the passengers around me were heartless weasels. They regarded the sick person like the latest in on-board entertainment… They stared, openly gaping at his misery. I glared at some of them, not that they could peel their eyes away long enough to notice.

Anyway, I mention this to put things into perspective. I’ve been sick for a week: headaches, congestion, a mystery nosebleed, and a wracking dry cough that appears at bedtime, like a phone call from a neurotic ex-girlfriend, to torment me and make sleep impossible.

But, as bad as I feel, at least I haven’t barfed on anyone.

By the way, the thing on the aiplane turned out not to be Ebola after all.

So I’m standing in the kitchen, making some sort of macrobiotic vegan meal with the recommended balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids and all 9 essential amino acids — ok, just kidding, I was waiting for a frozen burrito to heat up — when I hear an electronic chirp sound from down the hall. I don’t keep birds, especially battery-powered birds, so the sound must have come from a smoke alarm.

On my way down the hall, I hear the sound again, coming from inside my office. Inside, I step up on the chair and twist the alarm down from the ceiling. It chirps again, loudly, and I nearly topple over in surprise. I recover my balance, step down, and pull the battery out of the back of the unit.

Returning to the kitchen, I’m checking on the state of the frozen block of pureed vegetable goo in the center of my entree, and I hear a chirp sound from down the hall. I pause, considering my options. Without moving my head, I slowly scan the room with my eyes: Who’s fucking with me this time?

Back in the office, I double-check the alarm I’ve just eviscerated. The battery really is disconnected. I put it back in. The alarm chirps at me, loudly. I take out the battery. Then I hear a chirp from the hallway — ahh, the other alarm. What are the odds that both alarms would die within minutes of each other?

I resolve not to repeat my grab-and-spin dance to retrieve the second alarm until after dinner. And I retire to the lanai for a refreshing meal, except for the cold part in the middle.

Later that evening, I relate the above story to my wife, and, reminded of the unfinished business, arrange a stool and climb up to check on the remaining alarm. I flip open the cover to face an unexpected surprise: the battery is disconnected. A centimeter of air separates the battery from the terminals. I don’t see any tiny 9V sparks bridging the gap.

“That can’t be right,” I say stupidly as I push the battery forward in its track until it makes contact. The alarm responds with a full-throttle shriek, as if, just before connecting the battery, I’d set fire to my hair. In surprise, I nearly topple from the stool, but recover (with surprising grace), to immediately document the event upon this website, along with the question: Which one of you is doing this?