Comment on The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center

Maybe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• stopthatgirl7@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Looks like you’re the type the writer talks about at the end:

  There’s something to be said for pushing back on needless rules and bureaucracy, but it helps if you actually understand stuff before doing so, rather than doing something like this that had half a dozen ways it could have ended in serious disaster and possible tragedy. The fact that it “only” resulted in Twitter falling over every few weeks for months likely means that Musk and his supporters got the very wrong lesson out of this.

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  • Maybe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What risks, exactly? Twitter goes down? Proprietary Twitter data gets stolen in some server heist scenario?

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    • Womble@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Millions of people’s personal data gets leaked, Musk’s cowboy “pry open the floor and electrical panels with a knife” electrocutes him, or blows the power for the room/floor/building or starts a fire.

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      • Nepenthe@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Musk’s cowboy “pry open the floor and electrical panels with a knife” electrocutes him

        That one is a risk I'm willing to take. I had to stop reading the article for a moment to marvel at just how close we really were.

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      • Maybe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m clearly not a software engineer though lol

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    • chaogomu@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The servers were not actually secured in the truck properly, so another scenario would have been the damage and destruction of some or all of them.

      Plus, yes, theft. And it's not just proprietary data, it was also personal and financial data for users and advertisers.

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      • seang96@spgrn.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I imagine thousands of pounds of unsecured load would be potentially dangerous for the driver and all other drivers on the road too.

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• Everblue@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That’s like saying why wear PPE and follow safety protocols on a construction site, it’ll save us money if we don’t do any of that. Nobody died or got hurt? Perfect.

  There’s a reason things need to be done a certain way, if something had gone wrong what would’ve been the consequences? What if all those data racks full of personal user information were just straight up stolen by the random movers they hired off the street?? What if the floor had collapsed under the weight of the servers being moved, tipped the server over and crushed someone? Just because things worked out relatively fine doesn’t mean no harm no foul.

  Musk is an idiot. Deciding to do things his way to save money and time reflects poorly on all his other companies.

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  • fruitleatherpostcard@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Are the severs running SSDs or hard disks?

    I remember the story of the guy moving a shopping cart full of his company’s HDs across the street or something and destroying them all just rattling the fucking cart across the shitty surface.

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• exussum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The problem is risk. A lot of the bureaucracy that exists for any company is risk mitigation. The wiping of servers, or using suction cups, or any of that is a security against a large dollar amount to spend if something goes wrong. But that’s just the cost of security, it’s worthless if it isn’t tested. If a locked door isn’t rattled or deter someone, it might as well have been unlocked.

  He took a gamble and the doors were not rattled and everything worked. The thing to criticize here is really the carelessness. What if one of those servers got out and somebody stole all of that data? What if while under those floorboards he got damaged, or something related did? And it’s not just these two questions, there’s stuff in that article that probably wasn’t covered that we can question.

  There may be things that are not in the book that we can question, and that is the problem with Elon. He needs a string of bad luck to show how truly dangerous he is.

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• scytale@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  No, they were just extremely lucky that nothing worse than twitter going down happened. There’s a reason protocols exist for data center moves. The infrastructure manager told Elon that the destination DC in Oregon had different rack and power setups and you just can’t plug and play a server you pulled out of Sacramento. Elon also went under the floorboards and disconnected the power cables and seismic detectors which could’ve caused electrocution or fire. Then they were moving equipment that weighed more than what the floor was rated for. Not to mention the possible damage to the equipment by moving them the same way you’d move a couch. They also hired some random cheap moving company from yelp to move the servers. No contracts and paid in cash.

  Tons of things could’ve gone wrong. Just because downtime was the worst that happened, doesn’t mean it’s ok to do.

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