A friend, Awwaiid (who I'm working with on the Continuity module) and a friend of his run a small hosting company, epfarms.org. Their customers are primarily non-profits.
A while back, someone gave them two Xeon processors and they decided to use them, so they bought the motherboard and 1U case and decided to make it their new mailserver. The old one was overloaded. They'd been struggling with it for some time to get it stable. It was doing some combination of overheating and shorting but they got it into production.
Today I asked Awwaiid how it was doing:
Me: how's the insanely overpowered mail server holding up?
Awwaiid: rock solid
Awwaiid: oh wait
Awwaiid: which one?
Awwaiid: the new one?
Awwaiid: the CIA took it
Me (thinking he's joking): don't blame them. it's *highly* suspect.
Awwaiid: see... david, being, well, david ... decided to drop it in the school of comm to get some extra rsync bandwidth
Awwaiid: and someone noticed it (where the fuck did he put it, the hallway?) and tripped out
Awwaiid: NAU IT called cops, cops have a special CIA program... they decided it was a phishing setup
Reportedly, the CIA is planning on returning it (since it wasn't in fact a phishing setup). Right now, the main server, which runs shell accounts and Web administration and Web hosting, is running pivoted-root, booted from a CD since the thing decided a while ago to crash and not come back up. Happily, or perhaps less than ideally, that machine is at a colo.
I love these stories... it's like something out of User Friendly.
-scott
