One of the more drastic things that can happen in a nuclear power plant is what's known as a LOCA, a loss-of-coolant accident.  I like to refer analogously to some of the more drastic things that can happen to electronic equipment as a LOMS incident - Loss Of Magic Smoke.

This is particularly relevant today because that's what just happened to my ( Read more... )

Well, let's see.

I've had one infant-mortality on the new babylon5, the Gigabyte Radeon HD4350 video card, which ceased to output video on DVI after two weeks of life.  I replaced that with an XFX HD5570 card that was on sale, and will be sending the Gigabyte card off for repair under warranty (then probably keep it as a spare, lacking another PCI ( Read more... )

Friends,

I need assistance finding something very specific. Having failed so far, I'm trying to get more eyes (and more existing knowledge of what's available) to work on the problem.

What I need to be able to do is to mount two 2.5" solid-state disks into the 3.5" hard disk cage in a Thermaltake Element G case.  What I need in order to ( Read more... )

...From the new machine (temporarily named excalibur) that's going to be the replacement for babylon5, that is (and will take over its IP address and hostname).  I assembled the machine Thursday evening; by yesterday evening I had essentially everything set up on it except for sound.  I STILL don't have sound working; I suspect it's a case of " ( Read more... )

...So to speak.  I had to ask the NewEgg tech to escalate to his supervisor, but my efforts won me approval to return the Antec case for store credit, which is fine by me, since I still have AT LEAST two more computers and two more monitors to replace.

This entry was originally posted at http://unixronin.dreamwidth.org/786435.html. That post ( Read more... )

I've been continuing to monitor the behavior of my UPS using the UPSwatch tool I wrote.  It is quite consistently, every 48 hours, going into a mode in which, although still on line power, its output vopltage drops from 125V to 115V and it begins suddenly discharging its battery pack.  The battery charge plummets at first, then gradually levels ( Read more... )

So ... when I first got my current main server, babylon4 (which was new to me, but not by any stretch new hardware - including its disks), I set it up with Solaris 10u5 x86.  I installed a mirrored pair of 2.5" 80GB SATA laptop drives in the single bay intended for a boot drive, and configured the main array of twelve 300GB SATA disks as a ZFS ( Read more... )

I'd hoped this keyboard might make an inexpensive replacement for my buggy Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 and its astoundingly fast-wearing key caps (which aren't a defect, because Microsoft has cunningly redefined keys wearing completely blank within a few months of use as "normal wear").

No such luck.  "Comfort" and "ergonomic" on this keyboard ( Read more... )

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  If you have a HP R3000XR uninterruptible power supply, you can, technically speaking, hot-swap out a failed battery pack.  However, when you pull out the old battery pack, the UPS will automatically go into bypass mode, and may not come out of it after you put the new battery pack back in, so you'll probably have to power down the UPS to reset it ( Read more... )

Sometime about 0440 Sunday morning, my main server, babylon4, went down hard and fast.  I still haven't been able to reconstruct a single thing about what actually happened, but it left the machine down, with the boot archive corrupt and the boot blocks completely gone.  The last thing logged before it went down - about half an hour before - was ( Read more... )