2009-06-19

RIP: My Precision Workstation

Well it would seem that during my trip to NC/Mass.. my home server, an old Dell Precision 360, started making noises.. you know those kind of noises where a fan's bearings aren't always smooth.. that kind of painful ear noises that can be 'felt' across the house at 2am in the morning when it starts... so the system got turned off until I could get home.

I opened up the box and realized how much dust can accumulate in a year in NM. Two cans of air later you could see the motherboard again... turned on the box and the sound came back again. Looking at the various fans it was not one but two fans.. one was in the powersupply and the other near off the CPU. The box is 6 years old so getting replacement parts isn't as easy as one would hope :).

The only grumpy part for me is that I had just gotten the box fully outfitted with Spacewalk before I left. I was planning on using it to snapbuild virtual machines for testing local services etc. I had just gotten it to the point of updating boxes when I left on Sunday... Well it looks like I will be saving up for another box again. Could be worse.. I could have forgotten to do backups.

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