What's it all about, Alfie?

A few days ago, I noticed that sparky was dead. I don't like this kind of surprise, but there's not a lot I can do about it other than to try and find out the problem and fix it.

The last time I had a hardware fault it turned out to be a dead hard drive. This time, I took one of the internal drives out and placed is in a simple 911 case, so as to reduce the load on the power supply and remove one of the heat generating devices in the case. This didn't help. But I was happy to see that the drives booted. That's something.

The next thing was a Google search for Watchdog resets. Interestingly, the first hit was from the Ross page talking about the possibility that there might be a fault in one of the CPUs. Thankfully, I had the SuperSPARC processors that I had originally used in the box, and so I swapped out the CPU modules - going from four HyperSPARCs to two SuperSPARCs. Bummer of a downgrade. But it seems to be stable.

Since I really only use sparky as a server, and don't really need the speed as much as I need the stability, it's a decent trade. I really didn't want to put a lot of money into this box, but I need to keep it running for a while longer.