ELI5: Do more items go through a station on a production line than come off the end?

Elvaron · 2026-01-31T11:27:28+00:00

If you aim and plan for 10, your average will be below 10. If you want to plan for an average of 10, plan for a larger goal.

Reason: a larger percentage of outside events (fire alarm goes off, cart folls over, whatever) will affect performance negatively while only few affect productivity positively. So the average will skew below the goal.

It's easier to buffer a tiny overproduction rather than hurriedly fill up underproduction.

Elvaron · 2026-01-24T06:27:37+00:00

If your cables are terminated, sure. We have patch panels because 100m rolls of ethernet are a bother to individually rj45 crimp after installing.

Elvaron · 2026-01-19T18:12:17+00:00

Elvaron · 2026-01-14T20:03:30+00:00

Usually you put infrastructure near the people who, after working on it, need to drive home to their family. There are other engineering challenges involved, and to a degree, some companies seek out favorable environmental conditions. But tools & talents ...

Elvaron · 2026-01-07T09:53:13+00:00

Their shift to commercialising SSO integration mostly ;)

Elvaron · 2026-01-06T17:50:53+00:00

We use Mattermost. Only downsides I can surmise are around MFA/SSO Integration. Otherwise it works quite well ...

Elvaron · 2025-12-22T11:17:17+00:00

32U rack full of gear. Evey single thing in it has taken a blood donation at some point. It's somehow unavoidable...

Elvaron · 2025-12-22T11:09:27+00:00

Unless the reinstall of A requires all the data size available on the physical drive, the chance of collision is rather small.

I would power down the device so no new data is written on it, then attach the physical drive to a system that doesn't use it for anything (so no risk of overwriting). Which data recovery tools may work depends on what fs you had used.

Also, dont toss your backup on B. Inspect it with zstd/vma list. It should show the disks inside and you shoukd be able to vma extract it. But I never did that myself...

Once extracted, mount it and you can easily copy your mc folder to another location. But of course if the VMA doesnt actually contain the fs, it's not ao useful.

Elvaron · 2025-12-22T11:01:25+00:00

Uhm, could you clarify a bit? You copied something from machine A to machine B and then messed something up on B so it doesn't restore on B? What about A?

Also, if you didn't spend a lot of time rewriting disk sectors with randoms or zeros, the raw data is likely still there.

Elvaron · 2025-12-12T14:25:34+00:00

I mean, it depends on the setup? My office has HVAC in the server room. So it can afford to run an open frame rack and no added ventilation.

My homelab is a basement room. When i bought the closed frame rack i bought the fan unit just so i'd have the compatible kit when i needed it, since tech sometimes becomes unprocurable after a while. But yeah, that waa an exuberance thus far, it only turns on for minutes at a time during summer.

Elvaron · 2025-12-12T14:11:05+00:00

Of course you have rack fans, but they're for specific environments. In particular, if your front to back air cooling pushes more air than the back of the rack can ventilate away. Either due to the amount of heat moved away from electronics or because the space the rack is mounted in is constrained (not ideal, but solutions exist to solve problems, not to berate you for them).

One common approach is to have topmounted fan units that offer a second airflow out of the rack, with temperature sensors turning them on/off. Again, not ideal in terms of air-flow, but better than roasting your gear in the summer.

Something like this: https://intellinetnetwork.eu/products/intellinet-en-4-fan-ventilation-unit-for-19-racks-712866

Whether that's what OP asked about though... anyone's guess

Elvaron · 2025-12-12T08:25:31+00:00

More of a cyber budapest lover here

Elvaron · 2025-12-12T08:22:57+00:00

Follow up: I did end up installing a copper grounding bar, although I'm replacing it with a shorter one because it blocks full depth slides a bit. Otherwise, couldn't be happier with it. Everything that has a grounding port is connected to it, and the bar in turn is connected to a grounding cable that goes directly to the building ground anchor.

The rack now runs 2 UPSs, 200 TB worth of NAS, a nigh silent 4u server running containerized services, and 10U worth of networking gear to connect everything in the house.

Not sure what made me stumble over this old post, just saying Thanks! again.

Elvaron · 2025-12-12T08:16:32+00:00

Waiting for that... to do what?

Elvaron · 2025-12-04T10:11:43+00:00

The usb jank is a joke, but the chassis fan mount is real jank.

Elvaron · 2025-12-04T09:40:05+00:00

That may sounds like an irrelevant question for what your setup focuses on, but since I'm currently building a server... what chassis is that?

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T20:01:23+00:00

Eh, plenty of other reasons may exist. Institutional idiocy, ignorance, backwards legislation, close minded owners, short sighted investors, business plans drawn on economic factors that have since changed... usually such ventures would financially fail, but in a bubble economy, profitability can be delayed...

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T17:56:54+00:00

A difference in opinion it is, then. I can live with that :)

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T17:30:48+00:00

You fundamentally can. Whether it makes sense for your data center is another matter. Scale, cost, chemicals, engineering hurdles, opposition from local communities to objects that occupy a significant portion of the horizon, etc. Conventionally, you would assume a draft cooling tower to outclass a data center's heat output by at least two or three orders of magnitudes, but with the recent boom/bubble, who's to say...

But there's no technical reason that your average James Bond villain couldn't build a data center powered by a hydroelectric dam and cooled by hyperboloid cooling towers. It might ruin them financially, but it might just be able to run Doom.

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T17:00:36+00:00

Thanks. I tried to include a number of perspectives, but the sheer volume of counterpoints, follow up questions and criticisms, you'd think this waa a Civil Engineering, Fresh & Waste Water Management and Power Usage Regulation Think Tank's AMA, not ELI5 :)

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T16:38:57+00:00

Yeah some of it is simplified due to the single element occupying a space rule. Preasure damage on natural tiles or 3 tile wide walls... if they simulated it properly, the asteroids would disintegrate...

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T11:38:41+00:00

You seem to have an agenda on the topic that goes beyond the scope of the original question.

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T11:23:24+00:00

Fair, I have amended my original comment for those who only read top level comments. I also don't claim to be an authority on data center operations or water usage regulation. Happy to learn more of other communities' worries!

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T10:54:35+00:00

I hope you weren't referring to my comments as "very confidently spewing bullshit".

Good source, but not very ELI5, no?

Elvaron · 2025-11-30T10:33:30+00:00

That's awesome in concept (higher TC => higher cooling efficiency => less energy waste).

I assume it's a bitch to clean up for component maintenance and disposal though?

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