Sounds like double ungood day for Linode

Posted Jul 30, 2025 9:19 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Sounds like double ungood day for Linode by mote
Parent article: LWN is back

once the cooling goes, you *have* to shut down servers or electronic components start to melt themselves.

Way back at university we once had a week or so of unscheduled downtime because legionella bacteria had been discovered in the main campus server room AC and they had to shut everything down in order to get the cooling system disinfected. This was at the height of summer, of course, with temperatures in the 30°C+ range outside.

It sucked especially because apart from the NFS servers everybody's files were sitting on even if they had their own workstation on their desk, it included the machine everyone was reading their e-mail on (this was in the early 1990s when e-mail was still much more of a thing than it is today, but POP3/IMAP hadn't caught on, so you would telnet to the e-mail server and use the mail command there, or MH if you were a serious e-mail nerd), and some sysadmins spent sleepless nights jury-rigging a replacement system in some cool and airy location elsewhere on the premises just so people could get at their e-mail.