Hardware with a case of the Mondays...

Good grief, Charlie Brown.

I wonder why the hell I ever got involved with technology.

Saturday:

I’ve needed a printer / scanner to replace my venerable (and often dodgy) Lexmark and Genius combo (the Lex part having never worked with Linux but OK with Win), so I pick up a nice little HP PhotoJet 3180 for $99. Hooked into defender as a test, worked perfectly. Visit folks for BBQ, stay the night.

Sunday:

Get home, try printer on qbert. Detected perfectly, however hpjis package is old and doesn’t have the PPD. Decide to bite bullet and upgrade box to FC6 per plans for a month. Offline for an hour while this proceeds. Aside a couple of dumb package non-upgrades (BIND!) manually fixed, SELinux relabel, yum update + reboots, all is OK.

Connect printer up post-upgrade with extra-long USB cable, works perfectly. Client setup a little trickier (still haven’t tried Windows via Samba) but it’s there now. Settle in.

Later in the evening, have a look at Munin status graphs. WTF? Temperature on qbert is going up and up and up…. Has been since midday, just before Mum and I got back to my unit (bought a bookshelf she delivered). The top of the case is very hot, as is the gig switch sitting on top of it. Decided to shut down the box and clear out the dust bunnies. A little better but not ideal.

Sleep.

Today:

Fire up desktop, check mail over breakfast. Nothing seems unusual – except even overnight the temp didn’t drop. Hmm… No time, off to work.

Checking via ssh session periodically – temps continue to rise over course of the day, hits almost 70C at 2pm. Fuck this, says I, and I shut it down before it becomes a very expensive heater. Russ calls asking why he can’t get mail – I explain the issue, thankfully he’s understanding.

Get home from work – a little more cleaning, fire it back up. Temp evens out to ~55 degrees. But over the course of tonight it’s risen to ~65C, even with the air conditioning on (62C at the moment).

A closer inspection of the back of the box reveals the fan in the power supply has stopped dead, so no exhaust out the back to pull hot air out. There’s an 80mm fan under it but it’s struggling to keep up.

So, I ordered a new PSU with a 12cm fan on it, which should arrive tomorrow or Wednesday. Hopefully things will stay meltdown-free for that long but alas expect more downtime.

All hardware really does suck.