The Dell Optiplex GX270 that I use for a Fedora test platform and number crunching station has been behaving badly lately.
Symptoms: Abrupt system shutdown characterized by the screen going blank and a brief whir from the CD drive. System completely unresponsive, although power light remains on. Completely dead. System must be powered off to be restarted. Attempting to install FC5T1 reproduces the shutdown pretty reliably. Otherwise the shutdowns occur intermittenly.
History: CPU fan failed a couple of months ago and was replaced, with problems starting shortly thereafter.
Diagnosis: Suspect the cause is heat related hardware related. Shutdown is abrupt, with no messages logged by the OS. Perhaps there was some thermal damage to the CPU when the fan died. Consistent shutdowns during software installation attempts further suggest heat related hardware failure, with increased heat build-up from CD drive contributing to the problem..
Treatment: May have to resort to calling the Helpdesk to see if I can get a replacement system.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it…
The father-in-law’s getting a little frustrated with his computer now and has been surfing E-Bay checking out prospects for a new one. Since he knows just enough about computers to get into trouble, mom-in-law’s asked me to see about specing out and purchasing a new one that will keep him going for the next few years.
Old computer is a Dell I spec’d out about 5 years ago, a relatively modest 450MHz that’s starting to show its age. So what to get next.
Budget is limited, so I’ve been thinking about an AMD Athlon duall-core something. Single core would probably be more than sufficient, but I think a dual core CPU will stay technologically relevant longer. I’ve been looking at the HP Pavillion series, partly because Dell doesn’t do AMD, and lately some of the newer Dells at work have been having some reliability issues. I think I should be able to get something pretty decent that fits within the budget.
mod_rewrite oddness
Yesterday, I finally got around to upgrading the department photo gallery from Gallery 1.5 to 2.0. I’d upgraded my own photo gallery about a month ago with no problems, and wasn’t expecting too many issues with this one.
Installation went fine, and importing the photos from the old version went fine. Can’t seem to get the URL rewriting to work though. It works fine in my personal gallery, but doesn’t work right in the department gallery. The mod_rewrite directives in the .htaccess file don’t seem to be getting processed or something. I’m suspecting some strange interaction/non-interaction with some directive in httpd.conf and the Gallery-generated .htaccess, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. No doubt it’s probably something simple that I’m overlooking.
In the meantime, there’s another mystery: why is httpd always giving me SegFaults when an error occurs. It started happening after the upgrade to PHP 4.4.1? Yet another thing to dig into.
Update: Figured out the mod_rewrite oddness. Turned out to be an AllowOveride None directive that was messing things up. Once I moved the .htaccess contents into the main httpd.conf, everything started working properly. Knew it was something simple.
Spam in GoogleMail
I don’t know if it’s just me or other GoogleMail users, but spambots seem to be flooding GMail pretty hard the last couple of days. A few weeks ago, I might have seen 2 or 3 spam mails a week in the junk mailbox. Over the past two days I dumped 90 messages from the junk mailbox. At least GMail’s spam filters seem to work fairly well. I don’t think I’ve had to reclassify too many spams that got through into my inbox.
Care and feeding for your laptop battery
Good article over at MobilityGuru about how to get the most out of your laptop battery. Part 1 is mostly about batteries technology and background. More tips to come in Part 2 according to the end of the article. Looking forward to the second part.
Update:Part 2 of the article is here