“Blades are supermodels, rack-mount servers are the girl next door. I like the girl next door.”
- Dan Brinkmann, VMware vExpert and solutions architect speaking at BriForum on Thursday. If you couldn’t tell, this event was rife with quotes; see the #BriFoum hashtag for more. See if our users agree about the virtues of rack-mount servers.

“I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space.”
- Gabe Newell, ex-Microsoft employee and co-founder of the Valve game platform, on the prospects for Microsoft’s new operating system (set to RTM soon) in a wide-ranging interview with VentureBeat.

“At Armageddon, we’ll have 1) Twinkies, 2) Cockroaches and 3) Devices running Windows.”
- Brian Madden, speaking during his annual BriForum event in Chicago. What version of Windows they’ll be running, that’s another question altogether.

“As an industry we’ve been telling people, ‘Buy our stuff, you’ll be magically safe. “I’m glad we’re finally saying, ‘God you’re screwed; buy our stuff when you are breached.’”
- Bruce Schneier, CTO of security firm BT Counterpane, speaking during a panel discussion at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Check out more BlackHat 2012 coverage from SearchSecurity.com.

Hear an IT-related quote that you think should be included? Let us know in the comments, via Twitter (@ITKE) or via email (web-contactus@techtarget.com).

In many respects, Facebook is open sourcing its data center and server designs. Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, said the Open Compute Project is a way of giving back. It’s also a way to get vendors with more scale to incorporate Facebook’s designs to meet its needs with cheaper systems.

Despite what it means to vendors who may be scrambling to replicate Facebook’s designs and solutions, the Prineville data center’s PUE rating speaks volumes: 1.07 PUE versus the 1.5 PUE average, and the 1.4 – 1.6 PUE of Facebook’s leased data center.

Some specs:

• Vanity-free packaging with little-to-no screws, which resulted in 22% fewer materials, and 6 lbs less in weight.
• No duct work and no air cooling system in the data center.
• Dual AMD Opteron® 6100 Series socket motherboard with 24 DIMM slots.
• Intel Xeon® 5500 or Intel Xeon® 5600 socket motherboard with 18 DIMM slots.
• Localized uninterruptable power supplies serving six server racks.

How do you see this changing industry standards or vendor offerings, if at all? Share your feedback in the comments section or send me an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

• Get the latest updates to all applications on the server.
• Lock/disable/delete unnecessary user accounts.
• Change all default passwords and configurations.
• Download antivirus and antispyware software.
• Configure the OS to lock after a certain amount of inactivity.

He suggests several considerations as well: What will your password complexity policy be? How will you enforce it? What services will you audit and when? When will you review the event log?

Want something a little more concrete to help you out? Carlos provided a link to the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager, which provides “centralized security baseline management features, a baseline portfolio, customization capabilities, and security baseline export flexibility.”

Labnuke99 recommended taking a look at the CIS security benchmarks, which provides suggestions for hardening criteria for various platforms such as recommendations for technical controls rules and values for hardening of OSes, middleware and software applications and network devices. The benchmarks come as a free PDF and are agreed upon by hundreds of security pros worldwide.

Thanks to everyone who threw their two cents into the ring, and keep the suggestions and ideas coming! Leave them in the comments or send me an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

• Security+ SY0-201 Video Mentor
• CCNA 640-802 Network Simulator‘
• Securing the Borderless Network

This went out without any apparent cause: Total breakdown in communication, only to return again later. It wasn’t a virus, and all the hardware seemed to be fully functional, until it completely disappeared.

The facility was quite modern: Secure parking, video security, armed guards with AKM’s and Saigas. The office even required passing a facial recognition scan to access the facilities. After having a specialized name badge made up, complete with his photo and a unique barcode, he was given access to the server room, the epicenter of the irregular crashes.

The scene made our leaked server room pics look like a networking Taj Mahal: The server room was a refinished washroom/utility closet. Nobody had bothered to put in server racks, leaving the high-end equipment and air conditioner to sit directly on the floor amid moldy walls and leaky pipes.

The problem quickly became apparent: Anytime someone flushed the toilet, water (one prays) from the leaking pipes got on the UPS. The UPS’ surge protection would kick in, automatically powering itself down along with the servers connected to it, hence the disappearing pings.

A few hours later, the air conditioner would dry up the flushed water and the UPS would reset itself, and all would be more or less right with the world again – until someone else needed to go.

Blame the setup on new fangled IT theories: The server room was managed by a 17-year-old kid, the son of one of the company’s executives.

Mike Bailey (real name or nom de plum?) writes that he got to take an inside tour of FDCServers‘ Chicago datacenter, and has posted some server porn pictures sure to shock, horrify and/or amuse:

I went to the FDC Datacenter around the end of October after my friend who has a colocated server there asked me to help bring it back online. Not a dedicated server, a colocated server. It had been down for roughly 10 hours, and FDC’s technicians had no idea what was wrong with it. The machine wouldn’t post, and the fdc techs insisted my friend (who lives several states away) would need to supply replacement hardware to get the machine to post. After talking to him for several hours, and assuming fdc’s techs themselves were right, my friend insisted that he would pay me to go to the datacenter and troubleshoot the issue.

The problem turned out to be a busted PCI-E bus, but the colocation facility hosted servers holding the power supply in with ducktape, ports completely askew and some downright bushy wiring. I called FDCServers to see if they’d confirm it was, indeed, their location, but they haven’t returned my message yet.

They do, however, host their own gallery of data center pictures, which show a generally more organized side of things:

So are cardboard cases standard operating procedure for colocation facilities? Have you seen your own data center hacks that trump these? Shouldn’t someone call the fire marshal? I’d love to hear your thoughts on these pressing questions at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com: I’ll happily keep your information private if requested, and we’ve got a free T-Shirt for the best data center hack we come across.