once upon a time i installed these for my job. they were a nightmare.
@mikko @mikko
26 Feb 2021
You used to be able to buy your own search engine from Google.
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don't know if it was the fact that they were locked with a physical key and the only way to configure them was a webpage that took 15 minutes to work after boot, or that if you did it wrong you could ddos yourself
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Index all of your corporate shit, from docs to internal websites. Your own corporate google, on premises. Great idea! Messy execution haha
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That didn't exist when these were popular but the point was they were a black box that you couldn't get to the software of easily (they required a key to access the hard drives that only Google had) + they had solid amounts of compute to slam all of that indexing through.
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Like a physical lock holding the drives in or encryption? I always wondered why software for these never seemed to leak out
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Replying to @Goopypanther @mobilenewman
Yeah you would have to crack open the front to get the drives out. Google didn't provide the key. Presumably, not many folks game to crack open a $20000 investment

Feb 27, 2021 · 2:17 AM UTC

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Replying to @internetofshit @Goopypanther @mobilenewman
Nope, the hardware was just a fancy painted Dell R710, standard Dell Keys opened them. You had to remove the TPM Chip under the DRAC to repurpose them, though.
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