Just when you think you have reached a point where your computers run themselves, you use up all your disk space. So you start considering your hard drive upgrade options and begin to save up to purchase one. Then, your computer senses your restlessness and says “hey, I’ve been recording your tv, serving up your website and even running a virtual windows pc for three years now and I’m sick of it”. So it pops a few capacitors and starts throwing tantys every few hours. It starts with some crashes, a lost usb mouse and as a “coupe de gras” it stuffs with your network and samba sharing.
Yes, it’s time for me to find a replacement motherboard on my server. The best solution is for someone to have a spare working Abit BD7-II motherboard sitting around that I could just slip right in, but the reality is I’ll probably have to buy a new one and rebuild the whole operating system – including mythtv. Which means an outage of web and tv for quite a few days. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving amyo.is-a-geek.net over to a proper webhost for a while and this may be the best reason to do it. At least then if I go on holidays and the power goes out I don’t have to get whoever is minding the place to reboot it.
These are the offending capacitors. Notice how they are bulging at the top while the smaller ones are flat?
Ah, the joys of computing.