It has been a long time since I made an entry into the Computer Circus. This is a good thing. Today's entry is a success story, so that's good, too.

Just before going out of town for the weekend, the weather turned hot here in the San Francisco bay area. I also just happened to notice that the cooling fan in the power supply of my Linux box had quit. I am not sure how, or why, I noticed, because my Linux box just sits on a quiet shelf, all by itself, with nothing but a power cord and a network cable plugged into it. It has no keyboard, mouse or monitor - my only contact with it is through the network.

I didn't have time to deal with it, so I pulled out a table fan from storage and aimed it at the box and went out of town for three days.

If you look back at the history of this blog, back on February 7, 2004, you can see my Linux box (a.k.a. Web Server) in the picture. And the "New Computer" that started this blog also played a part in this new story.

A few weeks ago, that "new computer" blew its power supply. I guess I just overloaded it with too many hard drives and cooling fans. I turned it on one day left it on, and when I returned, it was dark. So, I ordered a new power supply (a bit heftier than the dead one). When it arrived, I discovered it did not have the same number of power connectors as the old one, so I had to perform some surgery to splice some connectors from the dead supply onto the new supply.

In short, that computer is now up and running again. Now, I don't know if there are additional problems, because every time that computer boots, it wants to do a scan disk on one of the drives. Yet, scan disk never finds any problems. Also, despite the fact that event viewer says the drive is corrupt and unusable, it seems to be humming along just fine. It is a phantom problem, but that may be a story for the (near?) future.

So, back to my Linux box. Today, I got out my tools and extracted the good fan from the dead power supply from the other ("new") computer and put it in place of the bad fan in the power supply of the Linux box. The bad fan was completely seized. I've never seen a fan so locked up.

What I like best about this (truly uneventful) story is the fact that my Linux box - the one that just sits by its lonesome on a shelf - had been up for 190 days, and the last time I had logged into it was December 10 of last year. And there is no telling how long the fan in the power supply had been frozen.

Try that with a Windows box.

Anyway, both computers are up and running again. So, until next time...

Keep it up!