I don't have much luck with hardware do I ? Maybe I should just learn to keep my grubby hands off it. This weekend I went shopping with my mate Jake to replace his screencard and Motherboard that I had busted with static when I took it apart a few weeks ago. [hint: I want anti-static wrist strap
for xmas! the cordless IBM one...]

anyway, new stuff needs a new cabinet so I get one of them too - this motherboard being a bit bigger than the old. So there I am checking that everything works, electricity, ram is in, cards are in, everything is connected a-ok.. well, anyway, Lets try it....!

Machine turns on, and white smoke comes out of it, literally twenty seconds after me hitting the powerbutton! I turn it off rip the cord out, and start smelling around the parts to find what the heck just set on fire. As you can see, when Athlon's get hot, they bleed green goo.
Literally twenty seconds, and *pouf* CPU is dead. Poor guy didn't even have time to be a CPU before he died.

as you can see below, the board and CPU locking place is unharmed. I guess that counts for luck in the bad luck.

Why the fire? I have no idea. I'll be bringing my toys back to techie-hardware shop today and swapping theories with the boys there. beats me why it burned like that....

I have a witness to all this, Andreas who took the close-up pictures of the CPU with his new camera [a whole 'nother story it's a fancy toy with macro and all]. "never seen anything like it". great. well you have now!

The Fan. If you remember I installed this industrial sized fan into acme to keep him cool. The fan lasted only a week. When I removed it on Monday, I was suprised at the damage. One blade has 'fallen off' completly. Look closely at the middle - see the circular burnmark?

The sticker has been so hot it actually shrunk and looks half melted. The server co-location room this server is in regurlarly keeps a temperature of 26 degrees celcius - their cooling fans are in the ceiling and twenty feet away from my machine. Not to mention
that the all steel cabinets [mine has no doors] are preventing airflow and hosting another hundred hot servers that are all spewing out hot air with their fans.
The air in the room does not move. Airflow, anyone?

The server is in Webpartners
co-location. If I were you - I would not even consider hosting here. The
one year contract I unfortunatly signed does state "cooling and
electricity included" but to them, above twenty degrees is perfectly
acceptable, and that the voltage drops whenever the big fans kick in
seems to not bother them. They have suggested that my Kelvin server -
made by the fellars at Southpole
who supply the Royal Technical Highschool KTH
with servers - is "not a good machine". This is their
standard reply to any customer that complains about the heat in the
serverroom. I have found at least three other customers that got the
same reply, ironically enough, one of them was using the same kind of
HP server webpartner themselves use.
My machine has a problem then apparantly. So I have a
server with a hot Athlon CPU in it, three built in fans, two scsi disks
[which also get hot], in the top shelf of a metal cabinet, above several
other servers, in the back behing two other rows of shelves that contain
other servers. The air in front of my machine does not move and poor acme
sucks in 25 something degree air in a desperate attempt to cool the machine
down.
but it's not the heat they say. Any ideas of what
else made an industrial sized fan melt in such short a time? Whats your
guess? That webpartner is full of shit? funny, thats the same as
mine.

I'm so tired of CRAPPY ISP's - I have yet to find
a good , friendly, economically vaible and reliable one. After reporting
my old one to the Dutch Computer Police
[after their so-called 'Linux guru' logged into my machine as root and deleted
every single user on the machine, one at a time with 'userdel' (some guru
huh?) - and then claimed "hackers had done it"] I thought
-I hoped - I might get a break on the bad bad IPS's from the karma gods.
Apparantly not. What really gets to me, is that I give a shit. I care so fucking muc about all them little emails from people missing my site, frustrated visitors out there give me anything from a worried mail to a whole bag of shit as soon as the machine is down.
It is my responsibility to keep the machine alive. The people I pay for cooling and hosting don't cool. and then the machine dies, taking my only income with it. damaging my reputation. sending my traffic elsewhere. Fuck. all i can do is watch it happen. Trust me, I have complained [first complaint logged only a few weeks after moving in february]. In fact today, he didn't wanna talk to me anymore as I have reached the point of upsetness that I can only scream.

Andreas (phpwizard.dk)
has a genious idea late saturday night - industrial sized fan and a bilsvamp!

acme is actually running in this state. See the green light on? The wussy fan you see top right next to the floppy is not helping at all. We yank the floppy out, and the CD drive. and everything else while we are at it.

the CD drive makes a good operating table when connecting
cables (red with yellow, right?).
Lödkolv is my favorite tool.

This is the brand of car-sponge we used. In the danish
recommended usage areas, it mentions nothing about servers.

where did it begin? acme complained and then acme the drama queen machine managed one of the worst crashes ever. disk two completly dead. disk one limping to its own slow demise as it could no longer rotate at proper speed. ram busted. fan busted. floppy drive busted. the busted etc/passwd taunting me. the single mode trick not working. the bad blocks spreading. i barely knew where to start. i took acme home in a cab that evening.

i needed more hardware. just the little bits so i borrowed Jakes lovely IBM keyboard, which makes that great keyboard sound with it's giant keys, and his old puter. i dissected acme.
got to work. one bad luck piece chain reacted after another. a smaller problem became bigger, and bigger. make a boot disk. pretty simple step. thats when the floppydrive dies. so i borrow a floppy drive. then i make a boot disk. then i need to train out to a warehouse to get another harddisk. at every turn a new problem. just constant bad luck. Is acme cursed?

it took way too long. thats all i have to say about it.
and i now need to replace;
jake's motherboard
jake's screencard
.: one busted IBM 32 gig disk
.: one busted fujitsu 6 gig disk
.: two REG ECC DRAM
.: CPU fan

or the whole damn machine whichever comes first. ;-) anyway - this ain't working.

I can't allow for that much downtime ever again.
bugger. this run and buy new things constantly is getting costly........ Spending this long on the phone to various hardware people who would
replace it under warranty is getting ridiculous. I want a cheaper lease - i cant belive they dont replace broken hardware when im actually leasing! i want 12 hr response time on hardware faults. i want something better than this. much much better. throw in a videocard for good measure.

dear freelance god, give mama a job so she can buy herself a new machine. ;-)