Re: Lonely machine needing company before it would work
I had it the other way around with a network cable where the center and the outer shell would short whenever someone walked atop the cable gutter.
As for Frankenservers, I had to build one when the only available hardware wasn't having a power supply big enough to also give juice to the disk cabinet. I has been running for a few weeks waiting for the actual replacement server to arrive. And yes, this was SCSI as well.