PGI (Re: [PLUG] Debian Problems, Not)

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Fri Jun 28 21:43:25 UTC 2002


On 28 Jun 2002, Russell Senior wrote:
> >>>>> "Jeme" == Jeme A Brelin <jeme at brelin.net> writes:
> 
> Jeme> Oh and this week I stepped on my glasses and my motherboard
> Jeme> caught fire.
> 
> Jeme> By the way, what's a good quality, inexpensive dual PIII
> Jeme> motherboard with a 133mhz fsb and takes 512MB DIMMs?
> 
> Are you interested in a refurb'd VP6?

Well, it was the VP6 that started smoking last night.

It's odd, actually.  I'll tell my motherboard woes and see if this makes
sense to anyone.

I had a dual Celeron 500 system on an A-Bit BP6 with two 15GB drives.  I
had Winders on one drive so I could play Counterstrike at a friend's LAN
party and my usual workstation install on the other drive.  I experienced
intermittent lock-ups, mostly when I was running Netscape or GQView.  
Eventually, I found a web page that showed me that there was a
manufacturing defect on the BP6 where an improperly sized resistor or
capacitor (I forget which) was placed in a crucial position between the
CPUs and when you were loading both CPUs to a point, the thing would
commit some random error.  OK, so I read a how-to on replacing the tiny
component with an appropriately sized one.  My soldering skills are not
what they should be and I fried the board.  Big deal.  I knew the risks.

So I used the Celerons for other projects and picked up a new VP6, a
couple of PIIIs and a gig of RAM.  When I rebuilt the new system, I
ditched the Winders partition and just used the two disks for my
workstation GNU/Linux system.  Therefore, this machine had never run
Winders or Counterstrike.  Well, it ran like a dream.  In time, I moved
the two 15GB disks to my fileserver where they reside in a RAID mirror
housing /home for my network and I put a 40GB disk in the workstation.  It
continued to run like a dream.  Then someone gave me a 6GB disk because I
told them that I didn't play Counterstrike anymore because I didn't run
Winders.  This person REALLY wanted me to play Counterstrike.  So I put in
the 6GB drive and played Counterstrike a few times.  Immediately, I
started getting lock-ups and X crashes when I was booting the GNU/Linux
system.  I took off the 6GB drive (from the secondary controller) and put
on a second 40GB drive I'd acquired in the mean time.  I formatted it
Reiser and used it as /usr/local/public for lopster shares.  Still the
lock-ups continued.

I had no idea what was causing this mess.  I thought it MIGHT be the VP6
and BP6 had similar manufacturing problems.  This whole mess with the
lock-ups on the VP6 started about halfway through Russell Senior's tales
of his VP6 trouble.  I laughed at first, thinking, "My VP6 has been rock
solid for over a year!"  Then all this schnikey came down and I stopped
laughing.

I also theorized that it MIGHT be possible (though I know almost nothing
about hardware) that some kind of anti-SMP register was getting set by
booting the dual proc box into Win98 and my system was going nuts when the
dual CPU load reached some critical level.

I don't know anything.

So last night I pulled out the CPUs and cleaned the thing out with some
canned air and reseated everything (and drained the power supply and all
that) in a half-assed attempt to restore things to their factory state.  I
got everything reseated and hit the power switch.  Power came up, but no
post... no video.  I wait.

Power down, check the connections, see that the CPUs are mounted and
nothing is amiss.  Power on again.  Nothing.  Funny
smell.  SMOKE!  SPARKS!  OH SHIT!  PULL THE CORD!!!

Weeping.  Sorrow.

It doesn't help that I stepped on my spectacles two days earlier and just
found out my unemployment benefits expire next week.

So I'm poor and without the finer things.

> I have one waiting out at PC Heidens for me.  It was under warranty,
> but I've already replaced it and have nothing to put it in any more.  
> You'd actually be doing me a favor to make sure it works.

What kind of deal are we talking here, Mister Man?

J.
-- 
   -----------------
     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
   -----------------
 [cc] counter-copyright
 http://www.openlaw.org





More information about the PLUG mailing list