The exciting world of computer failures
For the last couple of weeks, the carelessly-built PC that I do most of my swearing on/at has been turning itself off overnight. "Haha XP!" you might say. You'd be half right. Yes, it's an XP box, but I rarely reboot or turn the thing off. When I do wander in to discover that the thing's restarted in the night, I know it's Wednesday morning and M$ installed something critical overnight. Obviously with XP being quite far off the end of EOL, this will stop soon.
Anyway. The usual problem is dust, so I opened the thing up and gave it a good going-over with the Numatic[1]. (See last week's 'Tactical vacuum' ramble)
Still not working right.
On the manufacturer's CD of drivers and other shoddy bolt-ons, there was a system-monitor. I had hoped for something sensible that maybe resembled Munin (at worst) or Graphite (at best), or indeed would emit metrics to things like that, since I have a hacked-up monitoring rig on the BSD box. No such luck. The thing provided sits somewhere between a rather ropey AmigaDemo and what I fondly (FAVO) imagine a WoW console written by a complete bastard would look like. Or that bloke behind systemd. Did you know that there's a petition to try to make him stop working on Linux? Neither did I. Although anyone writing a monolithic daemon that runs as root and accepts IP traffic on a range of ports in the C21st is obviously missing the point on a massive scale.
Systemd. Just say 'Not on my fecking distro you useless tossers'.
Anyway anyway. Horrible code allowed that while everything seemed to be running a bit warm, nothing was actually... Oh, wait. 6v5 on the +5v rail and near 4v on the +3v3 one? That's not right.
Thankfully I can avoid all the local PC shops staffed by feckwits and indeed the far away internet ones ditto, and steam off to the fine types at Novatech, who both shift boxes and keep a clue handy for personal callers.
Which is to say that my computer works better with a fresh PSU.
Elsewhere, it's probably just Virgin or upstream transit having a shonky routing day, but all Wordpress-related weblogs are utterly fucked. I strongly suspect that one part or other of the Fisher-Price PHP or Javascript wanky broken bolt-on bell, whistle or gong code is failing to load from a shagged swerver, but since it's all loaded in-line, the entire page fails to render.
And that's just rubbish.
Later...
I think it's the CDN. Some poking about with Firebug (which is a fine web-debug tool) appears to show that objects from *.gravatar.com and *.wp.com are failing. Traceroute to whatever internet magic represents those addresses to v-n customers works, which is... Edgecast. If I cared, I'd hack about a bit to make my requests look like they came from somewhere else, just to see if it were a specific CDN node. As it is - "Haha! Losers!"
[1] Unreferenced footnote.
Anyway. The usual problem is dust, so I opened the thing up and gave it a good going-over with the Numatic[1]. (See last week's 'Tactical vacuum' ramble)
Still not working right.
On the manufacturer's CD of drivers and other shoddy bolt-ons, there was a system-monitor. I had hoped for something sensible that maybe resembled Munin (at worst) or Graphite (at best), or indeed would emit metrics to things like that, since I have a hacked-up monitoring rig on the BSD box. No such luck. The thing provided sits somewhere between a rather ropey AmigaDemo and what I fondly (FAVO) imagine a WoW console written by a complete bastard would look like. Or that bloke behind systemd. Did you know that there's a petition to try to make him stop working on Linux? Neither did I. Although anyone writing a monolithic daemon that runs as root and accepts IP traffic on a range of ports in the C21st is obviously missing the point on a massive scale.
Systemd. Just say 'Not on my fecking distro you useless tossers'.
Anyway anyway. Horrible code allowed that while everything seemed to be running a bit warm, nothing was actually... Oh, wait. 6v5 on the +5v rail and near 4v on the +3v3 one? That's not right.
Thankfully I can avoid all the local PC shops staffed by feckwits and indeed the far away internet ones ditto, and steam off to the fine types at Novatech, who both shift boxes and keep a clue handy for personal callers.
Which is to say that my computer works better with a fresh PSU.
Elsewhere, it's probably just Virgin or upstream transit having a shonky routing day, but all Wordpress-related weblogs are utterly fucked. I strongly suspect that one part or other of the Fisher-Price PHP or Javascript wanky broken bolt-on bell, whistle or gong code is failing to load from a shagged swerver, but since it's all loaded in-line, the entire page fails to render.
And that's just rubbish.
Later...
I think it's the CDN. Some poking about with Firebug (which is a fine web-debug tool) appears to show that objects from *.gravatar.com and *.wp.com are failing. Traceroute to whatever internet magic represents those addresses to v-n customers works, which is... Edgecast. If I cared, I'd hack about a bit to make my requests look like they came from somewhere else, just to see if it were a specific CDN node. As it is - "Haha! Losers!"
[1] Unreferenced footnote.