I lost a raspberry pi for a couple months. Just couldn't find the darn thing. It was working fine serving away.

Turns out it was in the basement. I forgot I moved it to be closer to my tilt Hydrometer.

For a while, the windows machine I was using kept randomly becoming unresponsive (both via network, as well as the keyboard+mouse) and I just could not figure out why. Everytime it did, I'd have to force a shutdown by holding the power button until it shutoff, then press it again to start back up. Sometimes this happened while I wasn't home, so it had to just stay offline until I was.

I got sick of having to do this; so I replaced the power button with a transistor and a RPI. The PI would ping the server every 5min; if it failed to get a response 3 times in a row, it would trigger the transistor for 10sec, release for 3sec, then press and release again; forcing a poweroff then starting the machine again. It'd also write these events to a log file. I think it was around twice a week ish.

Never did figure out what the cause of the lockup was; but it stopped when I replaced windows with Debian.

No mouse problem, but I've had to take measures to prevent cat-related downtime. Cats and power-button at the top is not a good combination.

mouse not pictured

Got my hopes up for nothing!

I hosted shit for about ten years before really understanding how local dns worked.

Imagine a primitive society that discovered literally every major modern scientific achievement, but somehow missed the wheel. That's basically how my first setup went lol.

One day, our internet just stopped working entirely. Our ISP was fine, router good, but no outside connection and I couldn’t access local devices. I have two Unraid servers. I took a quick glance at them, they were powered on, all looked ok. I decide to power cycle everything. Still no internet. Then I realize that I can still access Google from my phone when on WiFi.. hmm. That would mean… an issue with pi-hole!

I begin to try to diagnose from my phone with a hotspot to my computer. I’m getting warmer but some things just aren’t making sense. I go back and stare at the server running pi-hole. Then it fucking hits me.

I have the pretty odd and totally not ideal home network. I have plans to upgrade everything but currently I have two wifi networks tied to the same WAN. One network is run off of access points so I can get Ethernet to odd areas of the property. The Unraid server hosting pi-hole was connected to an AP and the Ethernet cable I used didn’t have a clip, so it just barely unseated itself from it, breaking the connection. The router+pi-hole config meant also breaking the internet if anything happened to pi-hole or that server. I swapped it for a better cable and it all instantly started working.

Spent that weekend sorting out the network so it doesn’t happen again. It was definitely a head-scratcher.

Then you tell people about it on IRC and become known as "the dead mouse guy".

But the maximum nickname length on the IRC server is limited, so you settle for "deadmau5" as your nick.

Also mouse not pictures

I was frantically searching for it, then i opended the post to See if the comments found it ...

At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box's PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.

One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. "Must be a busted fan and that's causing an overheating alarm" he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.

We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan... it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don't exist there.

My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.

As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.

Cat vomit... my cat hit my raspberry pi.

Optical or roller ball?

You don't need a mouse for a server. Just SSH into it, duh.

Not exactly self-hosting, but I've worked at two different academic labs that had unique issues and small budgets.

The first was on top of a mountain at 3km elevation. The low air pressure meant that all hard drives had a lifespan of no more than a year before starting to have issues. This was in the pre-SSD days. The "solution" was to boot from a floppy, never compress data, and have a student return the drives to a low elevation and swap them for the prior ones every six months.

The second was at a place that was using old Datacube MaxVideo hardware that we would never have the budget to replace. It would crash if the room temperature got above about 18C, so we set the thermostat to 15C. Which doesn't sound too bad until you've tried sitting at a desk for 8 hours where everything is 15C and the heat is just slowly leaving your body into the chair, the desk, and the keyboard. And then you walk outside where it is 32C and instantly start sweating because you're still in several layers and fingerless gloves.

Not selfhosting, but I remember standing in a server room with a hands' width of water on the ground (and rising), and hastily shutting down servers where the water was already in the case. It were big towers (Compaq Proliant, if anyone remembers), and luckily the board, drives, and PSU were in the top part of the big tower cases, the drive bays at the bottom were empty.

We got all equipment out safely, and we did not get electrocuted, either. We left with the last equipment when the water level was approaching the knees.

Back in the day of BBS’ my buddy had a wonky modem. If I picked up phone , pursed my lips and did a squeaky sound the modem worked and I could log into BBS.

Goddamn I hate mice. I just had to tear out the entire contents of a combine cab to get rid of their piss and shit, and fix the wiring they chewed off.

Fail2ban crashing on 3 seperate days i tried setting it up then one day i did the exact same thing an it worked

I got a little fanless atom PC from work that was being tossed because it "didn't work." It did work you would just have to apply pressure to it before boot because the CPU must have been coming unsoldered. I just stuck it on the bottom of like 30 pounds of gear and never had a problem.

Well at home i only have problems with spiders in my racks, not like the racks i have seen at work. Highlights are toiletpaper, chipmunks+nuts and worst in a school server rack a gun.

Mine would be when I had a 48 bay disk array / JBOD fail on me... badly. After a storm, it killed the larger card that allowed for me to get many of the drives into a PCIe 16x slot, and I was relegated down to only getting ~8 disks per box made from spare hardware. A single box I got 16 going. Add to this mix an SSD for mid-line caching.

These were all running bcache on top of mdraid... One single mount.

Yes I understand how obnoxiously stupid it was to run RAID6 on a 48 disk volume. It was almost all just stuff I could re-acquire over time, not irreplaceable things.

I just HAD to solve this one though.

In come several spare chassis / mobo etc.... get a bunch of drives powered and on /dev/ , move to the next.

A couple spare gigabit switches...

several gigabit NICs...

two explicit paths for each machine...

a bit of iSCSI magic, and one machine now had the physical disks all exposed to it... mdadm --assemble blah blah, bit of UUID chaos...

It's surprising that while a bit speed limited (I think I got just around 110MB/sec reads), it was nicely performant for what a huge mess of wires and disks just strewn out around my rack.

Managed to evacuate all I needed without much issue once I got that going. Now, I try to keep my arrays under 16 drives at a time, or keep a very rigid policy of "I can lose this and don't care" vs "this box gets RAID10 and/or offsite backups nightly".

back up your critical stuff people!

I had a screen get burn in (forgot to turn it off, oops) removed it from the laptop, waited 3 days, put it back in and it was flawless again.

I had a laptop that refused ethernet and would only ever use wifi... When the ethernet was connected. No wifi unless that cord was connected. Confirmed it was, indeed, wifi by using a dummy connector.

Bought a 10tb hdd that refused to read anything at all, opened it for giggles/curiosity and found a piece of scotch tape stuck to one of the disks and one of 4 disks completely shattered. The disk was still factory sealed (by appearance, anyways; they still had the antitamper stickers)

Had a problem where my ports would suddenly close. At first I thought it was Telekom, then the modem, then the NAS.

After much investigation I discovered that restarting my router would solve it.

After some more weeks I discovered that the crawling bots were triggering some stateful tplink firewall that would close everything until rebooted.

So the router in the middle of the setup was the problem, not the edges.

I’ve got Pfsense installed on a device with 6 RJ45 ports. 0 is wan, 1 is lan0, 2 is lan1, etc up to 4. Why I have multiple lans is somewhat tangential.

One day it rebooted due to a power outage and WAN worked but lan1 and 2 and 3+ were messed up. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but the second physical Ethernet port was non responsive at boot and Pfsense just assigned the ports as if it never existed. I moved all the cables over one except LAN and it worked just fine. Except that of course in the troubleshooting i had moved all the assignments around and broke it thoroughly, so it took a while.

Not self hosted but at work: after an update to both our firewall cluster nodes they both acted wonky, restarted 5 min after booting, ssh connection wasn't working half the time, dropped packages... the problem persisted through multiple reboots, support had no idea.

the fix was to pull the plug entirely, wait 10 seconds then power them on again. on both nodes we had this behavior and both worked again after losing power for a few seconds.

seems that even for business appliances "have you tried to turn it off and on again" is a viable solution.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #80 for this comm, first seen 18th Aug 2026, 08:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

for me it was the fact that the desktop case i used for the server had the power button on top and it was big enough to be pushed in, when my cat walked over it...

My server once randomly kernel panicked once (and only once) and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that a ram stick (too poor for ECC) had gone bad. Also took all my proxmox backup server backups with it because the validation would always fail (also due to the ram stick). Still worked fine otherwise lol

Nice chonky heatsink, goddam

it is frying here during summer in Australia. I have to buy a seperate airconditioner for the server room and pipe it into the intake of my home lab/nas so it would not shut down on me

I thought that heatsink and fan was a spindle of CDs! I thought that was an interesting place to store them I hadn't seen before...

I do not care to admit how many times when I was first getting into home labbing that I could not figure out why I could not reach a pi or the internet. All because I either killed an SD card for pihole or just plain out forgot to put one in!

I dunno if that counts or if it's the weirdest cause I rarely have any issue, but one day, I wanted to deploy speedtest tracker via docker on my 1st NAS..

So I tried, but it didn't work (I forgot the reason). So I try to check the logs, but it turns out my NAS was insanely slow.

When I rebooted it, it couldn't stop beeping and telling me there was a hardware problem, so I tried everything I could do to fix it, but nothing worked, so I ended up reinstalling the whole OS

Keep in mind this was the cost to see I had a bad result at the speedtest lmao 😭

Btw, I also lost all my important files, yayyy!

My WAN connection would just randomly start losing packets and would not recover, not full disconnect just lots of retries. Didn't impact LAN just WAN. Unplugged the cable or disabling then re-enabling the interface would fix it for a coupe of days to a week then it would come back.

Time consuming to diagnose as switching cables, ports, etc would require waiting days to see if it fixed it.

Eventually had the ISP come out and swap the fiber media converter and fiber integrity. But again it came back.

After several weeks I stumbled on a FreeBDS bug that was exactly my issue..I was running OpnSense and my gateway had I225s. Applied the scripts and it worked.

I used to have a Ryzen 2700X based system as a server. At the time (no clue if it's still an issue), there was a bug in the interaction between early Ryzen chips and Linux that caused the OS to lock up intermittently. I used a ATmega32u4 board to connect to the reset switch on the PC and as a USB device with a systemd unit that sends a ping to the board every 30 seconds. If the board doesn't see a ping for a minute, it reboots the PC. It was janky as hell, but it worked for 2+ years!

The mouse did not survive interrogation. Also mouse not pictured.

I thought it was the huge heat sink that looks like it extends past the side plane of the cover. Reminds me of something I did with a CoolAir Cosmos tower. I mounted two 300 cfm fans over each CPU and took the side panel, neatly cut out the area around the fans, then 3d printed a scoop, with a slot for filtration, to fit on the side panel and allow the fans to breathe.

Fitting a NAS on top of my cupboard. Been reconsidering putting it there though, may hide it under a table somewhere instead.

I should note that I haven't built the nas yet because of these space constraints.

I use e self made wood cabinet in the attic where also the PV inverter is located. I used Velcro to strip on the wall (brick wall) stuff like switch firewall etc, only to find those collapsed on the server itself every time. No matter which glue or adhesive i used.

At the end, a strong unbranded Chinese double sided tape was better and still strong after all big western brand failed over time.

Maybe a mix of heat and uneven surface was the culprit, who knows.

"not enough space in the used server for a standard power unit"

I wanted to put a dedicated graphics card in there for interference experiments - but the server is, well, a server - and those high availability PUs are expensive and a hell to cable manage

But a Dremel I had at hand ... And a second PU as well. Now my server has a second power unit which is only powering the graphics card and is short circuited to be always-on.

self-made problems require self-made solutions.

The backup server at my parents house really did not want to run. Something kept breaking to the point that no web interface or SSH worked. Now I'm not new to self hosting, so I ran my fair share of HDMI and USB cables across my space to debug something on my server. But at my parents place it's just that extra bit annoying, since I only bring my laptop. Finding a screen is doable, but the keyboard got me more than once. The only one they have kicking around has a freaking PS/2 cable... not even my salvaged backup hardware is old enough to support that. More than one time I had to wait for friends to get back from work so I could borrow their keyboard just to press 'any' key.

I decided to handle the issue by getting an IP KVM, which should help me deal with that, right? Wrong! I installed a new drive and that piece of hardware goes into some secure boot loop or whatever that is too fast for my KVM to turn on....

also mouse not pictured

😤😤😤

Not on a computer but I had a JVC TV that started blanking a few times a minute whenever my dvd player was connected. Whilst trying to fix this I attempted to update the TV firmware. That didn't fix a thing but I noticed that the blanking went away when the USB drive with the firmware update was plugged in. So I just plugged a cheapo USB drive in and left it there for as long as I owned that TV and dvd player.

Way back in the olden days, we had a hard drive with out any backups go bad. I determined that it was the circuit board. So I took a working drive and basically connected the bad driver's platters to the working drive's circuit board.

It worked and I was able to back up the data and restore it on a new drive.