Debugging Hetzner: Uncovering failures with powerstat, sensors, and dmidecode

To increase the number of machines under power constraints, data center operators usually cap power use per machine. However, this can cause motherboards to degrade more quickly.

Can anyone elaborate on this point? This is counter to my intuition (and in fact, what I saw upon a cursory search), which is that power capping should prolong the useful lifetime of various components.

The only search results I found that claimed otherwise were indicating that if you're running into thermal throttling, then higher operating temperatures can cause components (e.g. capacitors) to degrade faster. But that's expressly not the case in the article, which looked at various temperature sensors.

Dell has this problem sometimes. I remember getting the first batch one of their older servers when they were new. We had to replace motherboards' I/O (rear) section because the servers lost some devices on that part (e.g.: Ethernet controllers, iDRAC, sometimes BIOS) for some time. After shaking out these problems, they ran for almost a decade.

We recently retired them because we worn down everything on these servers. From RAID cards to power regulators. Rebooting a perfectly running server due to a configuration change and losing the RAID card forever because electron migration erode a trace inside the RAID processor is a sobering experience.