Short summary: Server down.

Isn't Murphy absolutely lovely? Hardware will, of course, break on weekends.

The light in my kitchen's ceiling stopped working a month ago. I changed the light bulb, a week ago, but it didn't help, so on Friday I asked Héctor to take a look at it. Absolutely low priority. The cable was literally roasted, so he asked me to cut the power off, in order to replace the cable. I did, without remembering to propperly power off the server. What are journalling filesystems for anyway? The UPS battery used to perform much better, oh the decay, so the server is abruptly shut down after a couple of minutes. As Héctor was not able to "quickly" fix the kitchen light, and I was not in a hurry, and do not really care about the damn light, we just didn't look at it any further. So far so good.

Some hours later, at midnight (maybe that's technically Saturday, but it really felt like a Friday, I swear to the allmighty vegetarian spaghetty monster with no meat balls whatsoever), I try to power the machine up. And a sadly familiar ritual is about to be performed. Since I moved the server into "the run down attic I call home" I dreaded the moment I had to reboot the machine. It would come up, you could see the blue case fans light up and spin, the hard drives and CD drives be initialized, but no beep, no POST, no nada.

The ritual dance would consist of me submissively kneeling down to power on and off in a random sequence the back switch, the front one, the UPS, the reset buttom, curse, turn it completely off for random amounts of time, pull the cable in and out, curse some more... never really finding out when or what would make it fully come to life. But eventually it did, after 5, 10, 15 minutes, without any reproduceable pattern, it did. Not on Friday night. Or saturday. I spent most of the night (until 6 am) performing the ritual, googling like crazy, fustrated and eventually plain angry. All I could find was "the mobo is b0rked, exchange it". But I knew it was not. I knew the CPU was fine, the MoBO was fine, the memory was fine, because when I finally managed to get it to power up, all worked well!

But Miry came home and helped me out, coming up with a valuable clue: The mobo was not getting enough power form the PSU, so I got a spare PSU from Héctor and swapped them. The baby came up instantly. So I was very pissed off.

The good thing about it all is:
- I learned that power supply units sometimes fail. Even my wonderful, 100 EUR BQuiet! PSU.
- I missed completely all of the udev fun. Well, at least on my machines, but there's a couple of people I needed to help out today.

On Monday I got a new power supply, it is a joke of a plastic, for SM's sake! plastic!?, PSU with a couple blue fans. Pics of old nice one and crappy new one here. My sitting room looks like a space craft, and sounds like a plane is about to take off. The cats have not complained yet. They have not disconnected my land line (yet).
Update: The reason I bought this PSU is I have quite a big case, a case I can ride! So I needed Log cables. And I had to go for a cheapo modder plstic thingy, simply because I could not afford anything better.

I hate hardware.