System maintenance

[Winston]

I will be taking down the server to replace the disk arrays on Thursday, November 11th.

[Winston]

I don't know why but... the primary disk partition went read-only on the weekend (mail might have been lost as it was "received" but could not be processed). But the system has been showing some disturbing signs from low voltage readings to failure to warm boot. Go figure, dual redundant power supplies, ECC memory, dual processors, RAID 1 SCSI... and still. So I am in the market for a Dell 1500SC if anyone knows where to find such an old beast, since I have lots of spare parts for it.

[Winston]

The server will be down for some system maintenance Thursday evening the 16th so I can swap out the SCSI backplane and power supply distribution board to try to determine why the backplane voltage is low.

[Winston]

Apologies for the latest woes. I seem to be dealing with a flaky bit of ECC memory. Being flaky, means it's been hard to diagnose with me swapping out sticks and restarting diagnostics. The latest set seems to work in this machine (but not another, identical server). In other words, I am going to save up to swap out the whole damn set when I can afford to.

[Winston]

Apologies for the latest woes. I seem to be dealing with a flaky bit of ECC memory. Being flaky, means it's been hard to diagnose with me swapping out sticks and restarting diagnostics. The latest set seems to work in this machine (but not another, identical server). In other words, I am going to save up to swap out the whole damn set when I can afford to.

Correction: Two of them are crap. Don't trust e-Bay.

[Winston]

The board will be down sometime early evening today (28 March 2011) so I can put in a tape changer.

[Winston]

The board will be down for a period of time Friday January 3rd for me to do some rack-and-moving. It will be back up no later than 1500 EST.

[Winston]

My server that was serving as a firewall finally gave up the ghost. It had been warning of low backplane voltages for some time and I'd obtained a replacement in case it failed. I just didn't expect it to fail today (I brought it down to replace a NIC and it didn't come back up). So now I go from circa 2000 (Pentium III technology) to circa 2003 (Xeons). Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Winston]

I will be performing system maintenance on my server on Tuesday September 1st but hopefully not Wednesday. Certain conditions are triggering "processor internal error" on both physical CPUs. It could be both CPUs (unlikely), one of the PCI cards (more likely), or motherboard; so I will be pulling or swapping those one at a time until I isolate, and hopefully fix, the root problem.

You will not be able to connect to forums or retrieve or send romanus.ca e-mail while the system is down, but any incoming mail will be queued on the secondary mail exchanger and eventually delivered unless I make some colossal screw-up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Winston]

Scheduled for Saturday AM, November 5th.