I imagine there's nothing like being in front of the console of a deployed aircraft safety-related software system, and suddenly seeing the screen clear and a large red ASCII-art stylized devil with pitchfork start bouncing around the screen.
If you are merely working with an innocuous FreeBSD-based development system in the privacy of your own home, you don't have to worry about some system operator seeing the dancing devil, shouting "Hackers!," and hammering the big red switch that severs the server from the net with explosive bolts, triggers the thermite, and scrambles the bombers. However, you might still find the ASCII-art annoying, and wish to replace it with a simple blank screen.
On the FreeBSD system I'm using, at least, the devil can be thwarted
by editing file /etc/rc.conf to change the line that looks like:
saver="daemon"
to look like:
saver="blank"
Note that this does not seem to trigger DPMS blanking, at least not on the system I'm using. I'm unfamiliar with recent FreeBSD peculiarities, and did not investigate further.
See also the old 'net story of Linda Branagan.
One of my White Lightning Ultra 1800 monolights was dead and had lost its light stand bracket, so I sent it to Paul C. Buff, Inc., for out-of-warranty repair. They quickly replaced the logic board, give me a new rear control panel, attached a new stand bracket, added a new 6-month warranty, and shipped it back... all for only $56 total.
$56 is about 10% the cost of an equivalent new unit, and I'd be surprised if it actually covered their cost of technician time and parts. Seems like they're treating repairs as a cost center, even for products out of warranty, which makes a lot of sense for products for which quality and reliability is important.
I'd about decided that the Ultra 1800s were way more power than I can use in my current space, and that I should probably trade them towards smaller monolights. In light (ha) of all the goodwill that the Paul C. Buff (aka White Lightning and Alien Bees) people just earned with stellar customer service, I'd feel a bit like a traitor if I moved to any other brand.
When I built my main colo server, one of the things I was careful to do was to enable wake-on-LAN and record the MAC addresses of the two Ethernet NICs.
Of course, Debian, which seems to like to release security updates on weekends and US holidays, pushed out a Security Advisory at 4:27pm on a Friday (EST). I had a bad feeling about this, and emailed a friend right before a warning/gripe that I was going to have to reboot my server, and that I had a suspicion it wouldn't come back up.
Sure enough, 30 minutes later, it was still offline, so I could no
longer attribute the delay to an fsck. (All filesystems were
cleanly unmounted, and it shouldn't have been due for a periodic check,
anyway.)
So I used a backup email account to ask a friend with a server on
the same switch to try a couple wakeonlan commands to try. Then I
began loading up a backpack with gadgets that might be needed to revive a
server, while running an electric shaver over my face for the benefit of
security personnel at the colocation facility. In the couple minutes that
elapsed, however, my friend had done the wakeonlans and the server
began peeping out its response to pings.
There was much thanking and praising of Jeebus, that I didn't have to go out in the snow to spend my evening in a colo, and then I put the backpack away and finished shaving.
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