BSD machine fixed!

So, I swapped a known working motherboard into the BSD machine.  It now works.  I also decided to use a quad core AMD AM2+ CPU that I had sitting around.  That's all I changed.

I'd originally thought the problem was related to the hard disk.  So, I decided the night before to disconnect the drives (it has two SATA drives), to determine if it were the real issue.  It still experienced the same symptoms after boot-up attempts, which told me it wasn't a hard disk issue.  I also swapped out the RAM with a known working chip with the same results when trying to boot-up.

So, either the the old CPU (a dual-core AMD...I forget the model) died or something on the motherboard died (or maybe there was a short somewhere?).  I left it running a live instance of Linux Mint, just to see if it stays stable over the next 24 hours.

Next, I need to reinstall FreeBSD (wondering if I should try some others as well, such as OpenBSD or Mint).  I wiped the drive, thinking that there was some corruption issue...shouldn't have done that.

BSD machine still not fixed; Slackware bullet-proof as usual...

So, I've had some time to play with my Slackware install.  I should actually upgrade to the latest, but I think I might try to get that BSD system back up this weekend.  I did upgrade firefox on the Slack machine, though...it was running a VERY old version (v2.x.x, I believe).  I'm running v12.0 now via my regular user account.

I'm tempted to install phpBB3 onto this machine (that's why I want to get into that BSD box...I'd just installed phpBB3 and had a very nice site that contained all my system and sysadmin notes that I've collected over the years...been using that software as a data repository since 2003 or so, on a very old system that runs phpBB2).

I've no real plans this weekend or maybe even the next (no autocross scheduled until next weekend and I'm opting out of that).  That should give me time to delve into the BSD issue as well as wiping the replacement system and installing the latest Slack.

Power Outages

There have been power outages here that have been taking down my lab equipment. This affected my new BSD machine. The drive became borked due to an unclean shutdown. After a few days, I got it back up again. It was a simple fix but one of the other machines kept me busy until I got to the BSD machine. The old BSD machine had an IP conflict with one of the Verizon set top boxes...I thought I'd set it to a static IP and when I checked, I had, but the damned router gave the set top box the same IP. I had to run around the house at 11PM trying to figure out which box it was (I've five of them). The last one I checked was the one I was looking for...go figure. A quick power-cycle and it got another IP. I wouldn't have figured this out if I hadn't used ARP. I kept pinging the BSD machine's IP but wasn't seeing return traffic...I telnet'd to port 22 and 80 and didn't get a response, either. So, I looked at the ARP results and saw that another machine had the IP...in fact, the set top box had two of them, but the MAC addresses were wrong on one (this was the BSD box entry...the MAC matches that machine). Very weird but hopefully it won't happen again.

I'll be looking to invest in a UPS soon. I need one that will be able to power down 3 *nix machines or at least keep them running for 5 minutes or so. Dunno if I should also ensure that there's room for the router...