I have a good excuse. I’d been having problems with the server becoming unresponsive, as mentioned in previous entries. Yesterday I decided to clean out the heatsink because the server was still unstable. I set up a “server down” message on my alarm computer, then took the server down and started my work. I planned for it all to take around half an hour. While I was at it, I decided to apply some Arctic Silver 5 and re-mount the motherboard. I figured out how to get the heatsink off, (press down on the catch – this was new to me) vacuumed out then scrubbed the heatsink and processor. I put the processor back in, removed all the motherboard mounts but the ones it would use, remounted, and put the heatsink back on after applying Arctic Silver. I had to take the PSU out for a bit to put the heatsink back in as I needed room for leverage. I hooked everything back up, and hit the power button. Nothing. Fans didn’t even spin up. I spent the next frantic hour trying to find where I had gone wrong. I couldn’t find anything. This afternoon, Mom kindly drove me to Vertex, where I found to my dismay that the problem was the motherboard. Vertex did not have a motherboard that supported my processor, graphics card, (although that wouldn’t matter) and RAM type. Neither did Discount PC.
I needed to get my site back up, but my server was dead. I used my sister’s machine temporarily to see how I could get my files back. I had neglected to make proper backups of my databases. I couldn’t get the network interfaces to come up, but then I had the idea that I could perform a MySQL dump locally and just go from there. So that’s what I did. I then moved my files over the network to my gaming rig, where I pushed them out to my BOINC Zombie #3. I brought the databases up and updated my IP listing on ZoneEdit, as the power had gone out during the day.
Well, the site’s back up, and what was supposed to take half and hour took a day. Lesson learned: (hopefully) backup before maintainance, and don’t buy computers from disreputable sources. (eBay cough cough) That leaves only the RAM from the original eBay machine remaining.