OpenBSD Journal

Periodic Outages:Hardware Flakiness

Contributed by Dengue on from the webmaster-as-dumbass dept.

The box is acting flaky, I think it's overheating. Consequently, we will be experiencing periods of unavailability this weekend while I sort it out. I will try to keep those periods brief and during off-peak hours.

UPDATE: Ok, it looks like I'm just a loser and the machine wasn't getting enough airflow. It has recently become warm and humid here in Nebraska, and combined with low airflow, it looks like that was enough to make it unstable. I'm keeping an eye on it this weekend, but I think that was the issue. It doesn't matter how many case fans you install, if you block them with magazines.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. I'm still having problems. Damn sissy Intel processors can't stand a little overclocking. I drive a broken Ford Festiva with a 134k miles that handles a 150 mi daily commute at ~85 mph just fine and I can't run a ppro180 at 200. When is that damn Sparc going to get here?

FINAL: Does anyone have a PPro 200 with 1mb cache they'd care to donate? After adding another case fan, ripping out all of the RAM and putting in 64mb of ECC Parity RAM (pirated from the RS6k box I've been building) and backing the processor down to 180, it's been stable for awhile now. Just in case, I set it to not drop into ddb on a kernel panic. Ugh.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Niekze () Niekze@nothingkillsfaster.com on http://www.nothingkillsfaster.com

    So Ramblo is being cooked? Isn't blowfish a delicasy (sp) that has to be prepared right or its deadly? heh. What are the specs of the computer? I'd be interested in knowing what this site runs on =) nothingkillsfaster.com runs on a 486 that for some reason runs nice with a p100 chip. If the site got /.'ed im sure it would blow up.

    Comments

    1. By James Phillips () dengue@deadly.org on file:/dev/null

      It's a PPro 180 running at 200 (hmmm, hot?), with 72mb RAM (soon for 128) and 2 EIDE drives. I used to use a 486/100 and never had a problem with it at all, but I was running much less bloated php code back then... So far, the machine's been stable, since I cleared away the pile of Network World and Information Week back issues from in front of it. That's the danger of a machine that sits in your living room. You forget it needs to breathe and start piling shit around it until it croaks. When I relocate, I'm going to treat all of the various deadly boxen to a 19" rack enclosure.

      The fugu (blowfish) is a member of a group of fish known as the Tetraodontidae that if prepared incorrectly, are fatal. It is the ovaries and the liver that are poisonous. Unfortunately, the novelty and the gourmand mystique of fugu are leading to it's endangerment. Over 1 ton of fugu is imported to New York alone in a year. Here's another factiod: The skins of the fugu are turned into lanterns for children and tourists in some parts of Japan.

      (all of this information is courtesy of The American University , and was located with Google .)

      Comments

      1. By Intrepid| () intrepid@pobox.com on mailto:intrepid@pobox.com

        Good info. Something to add if anyone cares--the toxin is tetradotoxin. Current evidence is that the fish actually does not produce the toxin itself, but rather some bacteria the fish acquires produces the final toxin. The toxin then accumulates in several organs (as James mentioned).

        The toxin blocks sodium channels. Grab a physiology book from a medical student or while at the bookstore and look it up. It does some rather interesting things to cardiac muscle cells (very roughly, sorta turns a regular, muscle cell that is responsible primarily for contraction into a pacemaker, or nodal, heart cell, responsible for the timing and synchrony of making your heart beat).

        Comments

        1. By Miod Vallat () miod@openbsd.org on http://www.openbsd.org

          Is the toxin used by the SSH protocol ? This
          would explain why it's safer than, say, telnet...

    2. By Niekze () Niekze@nothingkillsfaster.com on mailto:Niekze@nothingkillsfaster.com

      see...i make a joke about your situation and my NAT box (which also runs nothingkillsfaster.com and ravememphis.com)overheated and wouldn't boot. But since I used my favorite method of problem solving (ignoring it for a while) it worked again in about 2 hours. Blah blah blah...back to work i go.

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