R.I.P. ludwig.
I just have no luck with fileservers.
Until a bit over two years ago, I had a machine named “sleight-of-mind”. Then one of the hard drives died. When I replaced the hard drive, the machine rose from the… er… disassembled. I took that opportunity to change naming schemes; that machine became “ludwig” (as in “von Drake”, Donald’s uncle).
A few hours ago, ludwig began giving memory paging errors and became unresponsive to input. When I shut it down hard (being unable to shut it down from the console), it refused to restart, giving no response whatsoever. After I cycled the power supply cutoff switch, the lights and fans came on for approximately two seconds before shutting themselves off.
I took the PSU from my Wintendo, baloo, and put it into ludwig. No response, so I know it’s not the PSU that failed.
I don’t know what the failure is, at this point. It could be the motherboard or it could be the CPU. I do know that the machine is ancient (it had a 350MHz K6-2), and any replacement could be equally ancient; I don’t need a quad Xeon to serve up files and run pppd. Now to find a replacement that I can actually afford…
Comment posted by Rising Above Mediocrity at 8:06 pm on 30 January 2007:
Ludwig is dead. Long live Archimedes….
Instead of going through the trouble of finding ludwig’s cause of death, I found a suitable replacement.
The local Computer Renaissance had a pallet of used machines: Dell Optiplex GX110 models, with 500MHz CPUs and 128MB RAM each. The quoted pr…