Gallery archive down...

[Rick]

My home machine seems to have gone splut for some reason or other, but I'm at work at the moment, so it'll just have to wait til this evening...

[Rick]

Hopefully back... CPU fan cooked itself and machine stopped. CPU temperature at 99F when I got home! May have severely limited life expectancy....

[Mike]

Use pop tarts as your heat sink, then at least if it overheats it will do something useful just before going pop.

[Rick]

Not quite hot enough for pop-tarts, thankfully....

[Rocket Pooch]

Blame it on Microsoft, everything else is.

[Ian]

I think a dead fan might be a little hard to pin on MS, although I salute the attempt. In any case, if I know Rick, that box will not be running MS software...

If it still works after a Proc fan failure, unless it's a particularly slow machine, Rick is very, very lucky.

[Rick]

It's got a Zalman "flower" heatsink, and there were two other fans (one at the back of the case and one in the PSU) pulling air past it in addition to the big slow Zalman fan which was supposed to be pushing air over it (but had seized). The efficiency of its cooling was impaired but not totally destroyed....

...and yes, hard to pin anything on M$ in this case, as the nearest it gets to M$ kit is the cracker/worm break-in attempts it blithely ignores....

[Mike]

LOL

[Rick]

Hmmm... This time I think it's BT who've gone splut, though it might just possibly be my router. Packets get to the Demon/BT interface at anchor-bthg-r26a.access.demon.net but no further. :/

[Rick]

Hmmm... BT's bit might now be back, but I think my router needs a talking to....

[Rick]

...and again it seems to have vanished. This time it looks like my router's at fault. Ian, what sort of router do you have these days? Did you ever cure the problems you had with the Alcatel one, or did you ditch it?

[Ian]

nothings changed. I am still using the Xytel one supplied by BT. My problems were all caused at the exchange.

[Rick]

Hmmm... In my case it seems to be triggered by problems atthe exchange, and the end result is that a route (or sometimes just half a route) vanishes. On Thursday afternoon my logs were still full of inbound attacks that were being blocked, but nothing was getting out, so two-way communication wasn't possible. I was in a hurry so I just power-cycled the router, and that brought things back to life, but it's not so easy when I'm awy from home...

[Ian]

in PCWorld they had some X10 starter kits cheap. That's what I ended up using to remote powercycle the router. I used a Unix tool called Heyu to control it. They may still have some...

[Rick]

Cool! There's some X10 support stuff for Linux. Maybe I should have a look. Never noticed any X10 kit over here before. The webcam motion-detection system I'm playing with (//www.zoneminder.com) has some X10 interfacing to hook in things like PIR detectors and alarm systems.

Given that the router's usually still up and visible from the home side, I may just try to figure a way (probably using checkservice) to tell it to re-boot itself. Main problem is determining when the link really is down. Wouldn't want the router to re-boot itself every time BT took a short break....