embix

Just rewrite it with 80% functionality and force migrations on the users. Once the remaining 20% “edge cases” that require serious effort hop to the next job - where you where hired to “maintain” such a system and “just add a small feature here and there”. Ooops.

all other employers demand modern technologies

There are a lot of employers that’ll throw good money at you for maintaining and extending their outdated crap. Have you ever considered learning COBOL?

I don’t want to build car hell yet again

this, so much

tunefind when I hear something I like while binge watching, and occasionally to see what others seem to enjoy these days (although that only matches in say 10-15% of the cases).

wekan

When atlassian acquired trello, I exported some of my boards to see if wekan could import them - to my surprise, it could (at least for the kinds of features I used).

Since I despise Excel (mostly for the auto converting feature) I appreciate that alternative.

OTOH I am all but a typical user, and while I occasionally use LibreOffice Calc I prefer basic statistics and charts for SQL-tables and CSV-like data in LINQPad (since it’s the tool I use every day, i.e. to spike out ideas before using a real IDE).

non-moving home devices

There still is a use case - not that common in America but very common in (not only Europe’s) metropolitan areas:

If the devices are located in a dense urban residential area (say Berlin Gropiusstadt in the 11th of 20 floors) you have a lot of neighbors with wifi, and - at least on 2.5GHz - roughly a third of their wifis will use the same or overlapping frequency range. In the evening, when everyone and her dog streams the newest Season of Bridgerton those will send relatively short bursts for buffering the next five-ish(?) minutes.

This of course interferes with your measurement if you happen to measure at exactly the same time, so having multiple samples instead and providing an aggregated value is - for this scenario - more helpful.

OTOH: it all depends on the use case of those appliances - if you don’t have competitive gamers who wonder why they sometimes lag in your valued customer list, that’s a non issue (and if they actual were competitive gamers, they should use an ethernet/fiber cable instead of wifi, obviously).

And you probably did not get that much time allocated to add the delay, so going with another variant could get you in trouble if it’s taking too long.

Then sneak in a test case that fails if the commit is made by Ron and ask Ron to implement it in an hour, all tests green. 😈

Instead I’d probably take multiple measurements some hundred milliseconds apart and do a basic statistical analysis (average as “main result”, but also lowest percentile, highest percentile and median). That way I don’t feel dirty for tricking the customer.

wipe or fake SMART data

My guess would be that it’s stored in some kind of non-volatile memory, i.e. EEPROM. Not sure if anyone ever tried that, but with the dedication of some hardware hackers that seems at least feasible. Reverse engineering / overriding the HDD’s firmware would be another approach to return fake or manipulated values.

I haven’t seen something like that in the wild so far. What I have seen are manipulated USB sticks though: advertising the wrong size (could be tested with h2testw) or worse.

First thing to do is check SMART data to see if there are any fails. Then looking at usage hours, spin ups, pre-fails / old-age to get a general idea how worn the drive is and for how long you could make use of it depending on risk acceptance.

If there are already several clusters relocated and multiple spin up fails, I’d probably return the drive.

Apart from all the reliability stuff: I’d check the content of the drive (with a safe machine) - if it wasn’t wiped you might want to notify the previous owner, so she can change her passwords or notify customers about the leak (in compliance to local regulations) etc. - even if you don’t exploit that data, the merchants/dealers in the chain might already have.