the hardware curse
Yesterday morning, just after 9:45AM, the system that serves as my firewall/router hung. Since I was at work, I had no way of knowing this. When I got home, it was completely locked up, and there was nothing in the logs, so all I could do was hit RESET. I was hoping that it was a fluke, but as with most things, lockups rarely are singular events. This afternoon, Denise called me to let me know that the internet had died again, and to make matters worse, the same system was making a horrible grinding noise, and there was a burnt PCB smell coming out of hit. She pulled the power cord, and just left it for me to get home. I knew that I was screwed, as this certainly wasn't going to fix itself. I took the system apart and couldn't find any blackened spots anywhere, but the odor of burning was strong. I then smelled inside the power supply, and the odor was stronger. My power supply died, or its cooling fan died, which caused the overheating, and the burning smell. Either way the PSU was toast. This computer is at least 7 years old (I got it used), and the power supply was this really tiny 150W affair. If there as any luck in this story, its that I had another, almost equally old computer, sitting idle. I extracted its power supply, put it into the firewall box, and bingo, it booted up again, no burning smell. Its been up for nearly an hour, so I'm crossing my fingers that I've escaped without any other problems. So now I've had two separate power supply failures in the past 2 months.