Those were the days.
I was about to say that ProLiants use only TORX, when I realised that a great deal (maybe even most) of the design and procurement is no longer done in-house since I left HP. In my heyday in Compaq, the servers would ship with a TORX key that worked for the entire box, and woe betide you if you lost it. Since I left, you gents would know better than I.
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Thatâs still true for the few screws the system has (CPU coolers, motherboard mounts). Each system comes with a TORX driver mounted in a holder, which means there are a great many to choose from should I need to swap a motherboard or CPU 
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Yeah, provided that you do hold on to them (and it sounds like you do). Youâd be surprised how many customers lost all track of their TORX keys. (âItâs not in its holder? Does any other box around you have its TORX key? None? Youâve got a whole effinâ farm of ProLiant servers, and not a one has a key?â)
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Right, thatâs what Iâm saying - since at least the G6, theyâve literally put one of those in the servers themselves, externally accessible - so if you had a rack of DL360âs, then you have 40-some-odd TORX drivers you can grab for if needed.
Yes, I believe it entirely possible customers could still misplace them all but youâd have to really mean it to do so.
First picture here shows the service tool mounting
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In my time, they were mounted similarly, iirc. They go back to at least the G1 models, and possibly even earlier - 1600, 1850R, etc. (Most of the ML and DL models were direct successors to the xx00 and xx50R models.) My memory is a little fuzzy after this long. Suffice to say that shipping TORX keys was Compaqâs tradition, not HPâs. (I see that HP is looking at stopping the practice for certain models.)
As for misplacing the keys, well, I wouldnât have put it past some of the VARs I dealt with.
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I gave up on HP a long time ago; their product and service offerings are not price-competitive with Dell. Not that Iâm heartily endorsing Dell, mind you, just saying they give better bang for the buck than HP. Konica-Minolta printers are better b4b than HP printers, too.
You donât even want to know how long Iâve been a sysadmin! Itâs one of my older hats. Letâs just say I remember manually mapping Unibus addresses and leave it at that.
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As with all things, it really depends on the price you can get from your VAR. Hp was always price-competitive with anything we got from Dell (or IBM, or even Sunâs short-lived but awesome x86 servers). We priced out roll-your-own versus all the bigguns, and found that HP (at the time) gave us great pricing, way cheaper warranty service (3 year next business day onsite included!), and we much preferred the iLO4 versus the DRAC cards for remote management, so it worked for us at the time.
Of course, those decisions often flip every few years when you purchase new gear, so keeping an open mind about what you buy (and designing around the possibility that your hardware platform may be heterogeneous) is a big part of making sure your long-term strategy for hardware is sound.
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Well, tbh, I miss Compaq. At the time I worked there, Dell couldnât compete on functionality or quality - we had lots of in-house design and manufacturing experience. Did a better job with SLAs as well, what with DEC Nijmegen looking after logistics. HP did a dandy job of gutting our ISS and service departments.
Ironically, Dell raided our tech support people (Digital Equipment Canada) to set up their own server support right around the period that Compaq took us over. My manager of the time went down to Round Rock to set up and lead the department.
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I took a meeting at the DEC Canada offices shortly after the acquisition when Compaq was deperately trying to get us to use Alpha-based gear instead of our HPUX servers weâd inherited (I know, I know). Man, am I happy that we chose none of the above and went with x86 Compaq Proliants instead. Can you imagine how long weâd have lasted if weâd been an Alpha-based or Itanium-based webhost?!
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Well, I did run an HP-UX PA-RISC machine for about seven years after its service plan and warranty ran out with zero down time. You really couldnât argue with the build quality, although the bronze age OS, high power draw, HVAC requirements and high cost were certainly something to moan about.
With Dell, though, you just run through a couple of hoops and get your on-site staff certified as Dell techs, then anything breaks you have replacement parts delivered by courier. No waiting for a service call and diagnosis &etc., itâs more like âHey Dell ship me part #blah blah blah nowâ and âYes sir, weâll have you a fresh RAID controller delivered by a hairy guy on a Harley in an hourâ (that actually happened).
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That works well in the days where you generally had on-site staff (or your datacenters were large enough to need onsite staff). We had remote POPs all over north America with perhaps a rack of servers in each location, and it made it much cheaper to send in an HP tech, essentially for free, than have someone on-staff flying everywhere when needed.
It all really depends on your use-case, I suppose. Nowadays most large datacenters are proficient enough that I think Iâm fine with sending in spare parts and the service manual and letting their tech support have at-it. It also helps that unlike the HPUX days, nearly every server we have is redundant and able to be offline for a significant period if they mess something up 
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âMistakes were made.â You made what turned out to be a wise decision, but Compaq completely fluffed what were potentially the most valuable parts of DECâs IP, namely the Alpha and OpenVMS. Mind you, after selling the Alpha architecture to Intel, we were foolish enough to design the DL590 around the Itanic.
HP has been dilatory with OpenVMS as well - outsourced the development a couple of years ago, and are now getting around to an X86 port. Their biggest boner was getting rid of Nijmegen and outsourcing logistics to FedEx. Instead of having probably the most effective logistics organisation around responding directly to the customersâ SLAs, we ended up trying fulfill our SLA commitments through an organisation that had its own (different) SLA with us.
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Do you know who Will Sario (When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth) is modeled on? The Type 1, Type 2 sort of sysadmin classification system is something I have failed to grokâŚ
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Something nonobvious about Coryâs past is that he was a Sysadmin at one point. His Sysadmin characters, Iâm sure, are an amalgam of the many of us heâs gotten to know over the years. He spent quite a bit of time in that culture, including the first dot-com bubble, so IMHO, Iâve always assumed his chars from the sysadmin/perspective were derived from that experience.
for me personally, Iâve always identified strongly with MonkeyBagelsâ Origins of Sysadmins document.
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IIRC, @doctorow was 30 when his first book was published. He mentions his time as a sysadmin in the preface to Eastern Standard Tribe. I have to admit, I am such a Van!
I noticed youâve been sysopping for bOINGbOING since 2003. Do you have any humorous ancedotes from your early years here?
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I like to say I am of the BOFH school but really only in my mind. I am generally pretty good to the users.
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