Walked through an old server room last week and it felt like a time capsule
I was helping a buddy clean out a building on 5th street that used to host a local ISP back in the early 2000s. The racks were still full of old Cisco gear and tangled Cat5, plus a bunch of tape drives that probably hadn't spun in a decade. It hit me how we used to babysit hardware like it was a newborn, checking blinking lights every few hours. Now everything's virtual and I barely touch a physical box, which is great until a cloud provider has an outage. Anyone else miss the days when you could just walk in and unplug the problem?
Did you really unplug the problem though, or did you just unplug the whole building and hope nobody noticed until you figured it out? I worked in a shop like that for a couple years and the "just walk in and fix it" thing sounds nice until it's 3am and the one guy who knows the tape backup setup is on vacation. Cloud outages are annoying but they're usually back in a few hours, not a few days while you wait on a part from eBay. The old gear was fun to look at but I don't miss driving in at midnight to swap a drive.