I lost the server. The motherboard decided to depart from this world while I was out of town the last few days (this post was written a good week or so after the actual event). Good news is that I did not lose any data or hard drives, just the server. It’s probably going to take me a minute to acquire a new server, I can’t just get a new motherboard. I was using an old Dell XPS 710 that apparently uses special BTX connectors so no replacing anything. It was old anyways. I do see two swollen capacitors so I may try to bring her back, we shall see.

UPDATE: I did swap out the two swollen caps that I saw but it changed nothing, the board still did not boot.

I need to backup my DB a little more often it seems, I was only able to go back to October. “Lost” two months of data. I say “lost” because it’s not really gone it just needs to be retrieved from the (working) drives.

I happen to have a few Raspberry Pies and a PCDuino Nano sitting here on the desk so I commissioned the RPiv2 to be the new temporary server until I can get my hands on a new one. The Cisco E1200 that I had as an emergency backup router is in place so the house has network access again and the Pi should be able to handle Apache and OpenVPN for a while. Sadly I have lost all my custom firewalls and other roll-your-own-server/router goodies. Back to being a “network civilian” again, shitty.

You wouldn’t believe the story behind this server anyways. When I got the machine it had been stored in a barn for a few years. It had about 1″ of crud inside it that I had to clean out and it had apparently been in contact with water as there was evidence of such. I removed the sound card as it looked damaged by water and other crap. But to my surprise after a cleaning it fired up. After a bit of testing it was decided that it ran fine so I moved it into production – and gave away my old (loud as fsck!) AMD Phenom… doh! Turns out three months later that was a bad idea. Two days ago I found out this Dell had once been sitting on the bottom of a pool. Whoa wtf!?