Old Man Yells At Cloud

Technically, that IS my job description now.

In this instance, I’ve been yelling at the Proxmox could behind me for a while, and last night I was ready to “take it outside” for some advanced dispute resolution.

Attention Conservation Notice:

This has been two weeks of boundless frustration. I am just ranting here, you can probably skip it.

Incelted:

I am 99 & 44/100ths sure I got incelted. That is the technical term for when some incel orders a brand new Nvidia RTX 5060Ti, scrapes part of the serial number sticker on the one he fucked up overclocking, and sends it back to PNY.

Used - in a liquid cooled machine, leaving this condensation dust stuff.

Abused - no idea what’s going on here.

Obstruction of Justice - gonna bet when PNY is done checking, what’s in the box does not match the serial number they sold. Luckily since it’s all one vendor, they should be able to sort it out.

I took the photos and contacted support the day I got it. They assured me my warranty was good, so I shrugged and forged ahead. Stupid me …

Angry Return:

I woke up yesterday, aware of what had happened, and I did this. The PNY got returned in the morning, the Gigabyte arrived in the evening. I goofed on the return so now I have $nothing in my food budget and I’m waiting to get a refund on my Amazon card. Hence the anger.

Benefits:

I should be getting a $471 refund, which will more than take care of the stuff I’ve been asking the Claude Camp folks to help cover. But … food budget => $0, so I still need an assist here.

Result:

So here’s the final result, at least at the hardware level. Z4 workstation on the bottom, HP EliteDesk G5 on top. The two black things at the back are 1TB Western Digital Red NAS drives in USB enclosures. The little one is basically a miniature of the big one - they’re both Proxmox 9.0.3 systems now. Desk computer duties are assigned to the surviving Pi5, the other one went off an adventure with a new coworker.

This has been made dramatically more complex by the need to maintain the one working image of the old Disinfodrome system. I got cluster services going, managed to clone things, and if my frustration with the workstation boils over, I won’t be destroying years of work in the process. The redacted machine names are a Disinfodrome project that was idle for eighteen months, which is now coming back to life.

Conclusion:

So there you have it. If I could afford a new computer, this would have all been done two weeks ago. Instead it’s old workstation vs. new video card, made dramatically more complex by some little shit who thought he was being clever with the original GPU. Even so, this is why I can kinda do stuff with Promox - running touchy VMs on minimal systems is an education you can’t GET any other way.

I am trying to be philosophical here - two weeks of Proxmox training free and it saved me $1k or more in new workstation costs. Grrrrrrrrrrr ….

That being said, I will be listening to Simon & Garfunkel until my blood pressure comes down out of the stratosphere.