17. Many moons ago we had a server that needed to be rebooted manually because the OS was really fucked. At 20:00 daily. Couldn’t reinstall or fix because it had a software with a license that could be lost if reinstalled. And couldn’t be reapplied because the maker had long ago left the market and no support or contact.
So our option was to be there daily at 20:00 or find out something.
We set up a toy of a fighting clown with a metal bar attached to its fist to trigger daily at 20:00. It was triggered with an integrated circuit with a timer. At 20:00 the toy was powered on, launching its fist with the attached bar against the server’s power on/power off button. First punch powered it off. At 20:10 it was triggered again, powering on the server.
We had this running for 6 months until we were able to reverse engineer the software’s functionalities and our coder made a program fully compatible with some of our scripting-foo.
Yeah trashy but it worked.
EDIT: To the many brilliant minds suggesting a cronjob… the OS didn’t reboot or powered off from the OS because, as clearly said, the OS was unstable. It’s not like we didn’t try everything before using a toy clown. No, no manageable or programmable outlets either. No, the server had no management interface or management underlaying system. The unique and only safe way of rebooting was by physically pushing the power button.
