Warning: Found a huge dust bunny inside a server tower at a library in Springfield last week

I was called out to the main public library in Springfield last Thursday because one of their catalog servers kept overheating. When I popped the side panel off, I couldn't believe what I saw. There was a solid mat of dust and cat hair about an inch thick covering the entire CPU heatsink and the power supply fan. Looked like it had been building up for years, maybe five or six. I vacuumed it out carefully, replaced the thermal paste, and the temps dropped by 25 degrees. Has anyone else run into neglected public machines this bad, or was this just a unique case?

2 comments

2 Comments

corad8417d ago

Oh man, wait until you hear what happened to my buddy Dave who works IT for a school district. He got a call about a computer lab that kept randomly shutting down, right? Turns out some kid had been sneaking in after hours and basically using one of the towers as a secret snack station. There were crushed up Cheetos, a half-eaten granola bar wrapper, and this weird sticky residue all over the motherboard. The dust was bad enough, but the real kicker was when he found a live moth that had somehow gotten trapped inside and died near the power supply. He said the smell when he opened it up was unreal, like burnt cheese and electronics mixed together. He had to replace the whole power supply and the motherboard because the moth guts had shorted something out. So yeah, I think library dust bunnies are pretty common, but people doing weird stuff inside computers is a whole other level of neglect.

amymiller17d ago

Oh man, that moth story is gnarly. I actually read somewhere that libraries and schools are the worst for this kind of thing because their IT budgets are usually tiny and they don't have a dedicated cleaning staff for the electronics. I mean, dust bunnies the size of small mammals are basically a given in those places after a few years. But a live moth dying inside a power supply is next level gross. That burnt cheese and electronics smell he mentioned sounds exactly like what I'd expect from fried bug guts.