Server Maintenance with a Hacksaw

A sysadmin or programmer with a soldering iron conjures certain scary images, but how about a hacksaw?

My dual Athlon server started roaring as a CPU fan began to wear, so I closed the office door for the night, and rushed out to buy a new set of coolers for it the next day. I got some nice round tornado heatsinks and fans. Of course, Tyan has the capacitors mounted awfully close to the CPUs.

When all was said and done, I ended up notching out a couple fins on each heatsink to make room for the capacitors. (That seemed like a better idea than notching the caps.)

That modification, some badly-seated RAM, an accidentally unplugged SCSI drive, and some research into some existing APIC errors extended my maintenance window to about 3 hours. I had hoped to do it all in 30 minutes.