OT: server maintenance

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Bill Campbell) say:
> 
> 1999, and I doubt it's been opened since then.  Uptime was limited to long
> power outages before I finally got around to buying a 3kw generator.

Speaking of power...anyone figure an APC 650 will run a 450watt max CPU and
a 17" flat-screen LCD okay, or will I need to update the UPS as well?

> CPU and power supply Fans are probably the most critical items on machines
> today.  A couple of years ago AMD processors would leave smoking craters on
> the main board if the fan failed.  I think this isn't nearly as critical
> today as it was then.  We keep a couple of PC Power and Cooling power
> supplies around in case of power supply failures.

Problem is, AMD's don't have step-down.  If they overheat, they keep
running at the same rate.  Your real iNTEL's will scale back, so that
P4-3.8GHz might actually be running at 700MHz after a while--but it hasn't
fried.  The AMD has, as you said, basically melted.  Apparently it's not as
bad as it used to be--the original Athlons and Durons that came out that
had the huge heat issues (1000 and 1800 Athlons, I remember) were problem
children--but then they came out with mainboards with BIOSes that would
monitor the chip and shut the system down (or sound an alarm or something)
if it overheated.  (Just what you want--a system shutting down arbitrarily.)
At least it won't melt down though.  And I believe I heard someone say
theirs had programmable threshholds.

This first and only AMD I owned was a 486/120, and I apparently got lucky
because I never had problems with mine, but most of that line were supposed
to be fickle as you'd ever think something could get.  That hasn't been
powered up in six years or so though.  I blew the power supply fan, it
had a hot HD in there (5.25 FH 1.4gig Fujitsu, as well as two others), and
I just didn't trust it anymore, so I just retired it, not feeling it was
worth buying a new AT power supply when ATX had pretty much taken over.
Had one of the longest lived HD's I've had in it though...an IDE Maxtor
that ran from 1992 through 1999 and was still showing no signs of failure
whatsoever.  My Seagate 'cudda's are starting to die...at least one of
them...a very slow death.  I've lost a few sectors on win95's C drive.  :(
But I'm not horribly worried yet.  I watched someone remap 50% of an old 
drive in a Fortune system before finally having to give up on it.  They
haven't started the grinding wheel bearing noise in earnest yet, so I
imagine they've got some life left in them.  :)  That's what usually goes
on me is the drive motor bearings.  And that can take up to 18+ months once
it starts doing it seriously.  

mark->
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