The Day The Newsserver Died

Now, when you're a certified NNTP junkie, this is a bad thing. And when you've manouvered into the position of newsadmin as means of supporting your habit, it means time to do all that stuff you're supposed to be able to do, and get that most essential of Internet services rocking again.

In this case, the diagnosis was that the motherboard or something thereupon was toast; it survived a PSU swap without humming to life.

Fortunately, there was a nice fast P3 that hadn't gone into production yet, so there was a mobo that worked. Unfortunately, it was too late at night to move the drives over, so I just plunked them down side-by-each, ran the SCSI, IDE, and power cables across in some kind of wierd Siamese embrace, put a piece of cardboard [extra points if you spot what it was from] underneath one box to line up the cable accesses, tied them together with a spare length of Cat5, booted, saw that it ran, posted a test rant to a.s.r to prove that it was working, and went home. In the morning I brought in a camera, and these pics are proof that it ran for at least the balance of that night.

BTW, the box in the back of the top photo is Thud, my own workstation (the next IP number available on the LAN the day I started ended in .105, and the extra drive bays are because it was a former newsserver itself), and the box in the back of the bottom one belonged to our Rabid NT Guy, and we called it Kant partly because we were naming servers after philosophers and theologians, and partly because it couldn't.

Update: the newsswerver couldn't swim either.