# The Dust I Never Looked At

I built a quiet server and I put it on a shelf,
then did not open up the case for three years by myself.

It ran the whole time, more or less, and never made a fuss.
The fans got slowly louder in a way I could discuss

as normal aging, settling, the sound a machine makes,
and there is always something else to fix before it breaks.

The clocks began to wander in the summer of the third year.
A build that took ten minutes now took twenty, which was queer.

I read it as a software thing. I profiled half a day.
I blamed a compiler upgrade in a fairly confident way.

The processor was throttling. It had been for several weeks.
The heatsink was a felt gray brick with no gaps in between its peaks.

Air is the whole cooling plan on almost every box,
and air that cannot move is just a room inside a box.

Here is the honest other side, and I do mean honest:
opening a running server is a risk you cannot dodge.

You knock a cable, you reseat a stick of memory wrong,
and the maintenance you did for health is what takes the thing along.

I still say look, but look with a plan and look with a spare,
and never do the first one on a system nobody can spare.

What gets you next is not the dust. You will clean that out fine.
It is the fan you find is dead and cannot buy a replacement line,

because the part is nine years old, the vendor left the trade,
and the only ones on the market are the fakes that someone made.