Steve Dougherty's Blog

It seems we now have five cats. I’m looking into options for filters so my heatsinks aren’t clogged with all the cat hair. It’s far easier to brush things off a filter than blow them out from between heatsink fins. I should also renew my efforts to get our machines off the ground so they act less like vacuums. I really don’t understand the thought that went on in this decision, and in some ways doubt it occurred.

In other news, Zombie 6 started making an alternating tone, and it was only when I installed a sensor kernel module that I discovered:

$ sensors

acpitz-virtual-0

Adapter: Virtual device

temp1: +60.5°C (crit = +65.0°C

w83697hf-isa-0290

Adapter: ISA adapter

VCore: +1.74 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +0.00 V) ALARM

+3.3V: +1.52 V (min = +0.14 V, max = +2.05 V)

+5V: +4.78 V (min = +0.05 V, max = +1.72 V) ALARM

+12V: +12.16 V (min = +0.43 V, max = +0.49 V) ALARM

-12V: +2.11 V (min = -3.07 V, max = -13.59 V) ALARM

-5V: +0.33 V (min = -7.71 V, max = -7.71 V) ALARM

V5SB: +5.59 V (min = +0.22 V, max = +0.00 V) ALARM

VBat: +3.07 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +0.00 V) ALARM

fan1: 5192 RPM (min = 168750 RPM, div = 2) ALARM

fan2: 0 RPM (min = 8881 RPM, div = 2) ALARM

temp1: +33.0°C (high = +12.0°C, hyst = +16.0°C) ALARM sensor = thermistor

temp2: +60.5°C (high = +60.0°C, hyst = +55.0°C) ALARM sensor = thermistor

beep_enable:enabled

I really hope either the default rail voltage ranges are somehow wrong, that the CPU overheating was leading to strangeness, or that I’m misunderstanding something, because if those are the rails’ actual voltages, I’m surprised the machine was still running and not on fire. Ranges including 0 seem weird, I don’t know if it’s listing acceptable variance from the stated voltage, and if so it seems in some cases too wide a range for normal operation. It’s probably not seeing a rotation speed for fan 2 because if I recall correctly it’s running off molex. I should add some sort of temperature monitoring to my machines. I will probably have to reseat a heatsink in the near future. For now the machine is off and unplugged – it’s unplugged just in case the PSU is really that broken and the 5V rail might do something nasty.

When I went downstairs to check for water leaking into the basement during the storm last night, Zombie 1 was making weird noises. I powered it down and today found that it seemed that the PSU, not the optical drive or hard drive, was making the weird noises. This is a shame for many reasons. I don’t really need an optical drive in the thing, I have many spare 3.5″ IDE hard drives, and the PSU is a weird one that’s the wrong shape. Even if I bought a normal PSU and connected it from outside the case or something crazy like that, it would likely cost more than the machine cost me in the first place. At this point I’ve turned it back on and I guess we’ll just see how long it will last. This feels oddly sad.

EDIT: It is no longer making strange noises, at least for now.

It turns out to be rediculously easy. I plan to use it so that the backup machine can log into the server without a password, but not the other way around.

Behold! We made this during robotics. Click for the original. It’s somewhat messy, but still amusing.