Hello my first post on this forum. I've sreached google for an answer and found nothing. My problem started a week ago when the speaker cable came loose inside my machine(*1) and kept shorting the power supply. Now this is my internal webserver that allows me to build sites and mess around. Its headless and i can ssh in or config via webmin. When i first set this up it was running great but since the cable came lose every so often the server would drop from the network. If i'm working on pages then it says up and works great but if i leave it for a while it just drops. I was wondering if you guys had any advice. I'm pretty new to all this so bare with me. *1 machine details 900mhz pIII 256 ram 80gb hardrive 250gb hardrive ATA raid controller pci card built in ethernet built in graphics(running headless)
The power supply shortage may have damaged your motherboard. If the problem only happens now and then and is not reproducible with a specific sequence of actions there's not much you can do exept replace hardware. Could be memory (how about static electricity when you fixed the loose speaker cable)? Not much we can help you with, sorry
i've got some spare ram i'll try that. I did take out the pram battery as well at one point don't know if that could be a cause.
Thanks i'll give that a whirl. I have swapped the ram around as well just incase. Say if the mobo is messed up. Could i just swap the hard drives and ATA pci card over to new mobo and wil that just work?
If it's a similar mobo, yes. Don't know what happens if it's a different chipset. Could work, maybe not. Personally, when I'm going to use a new server/hardware, I let the installation procedure figure out what hardware I have and have it install the appropriate drivers.... You could try, depends on how important your current server/data is and if you need to keep it online as much as possible. Make a backup 1st and test your restore.
I did it with ubuntu once and that worked. The only thing that messed up was the gui but this server has none of that. Cheers for the help.
Might just be a hopeless optimist but... Could it be the shorting is a red herring? I'm thinking, if it works as long as it's actively used and drops off when idle, could it be your power management suspending it? I wouldn't normally expect this to cause it to drop all the way off the network but if it's hibernating rather than just turning off the video it could do (my laptop does, which is pretty irritating).
so far so good. I've left it fo ages an it hasn't dropped me off at all yet. How do i check the power management via comand line?
Hmm, good question. I could be wrong but I think it could have something to do with the apm(1) command; see the man-page for details. I tried apm -M (Monitor according to the manpage) on one of my boxes and it said there was no APM support in my kernel, though, which I think is unlikely to be because of any weirdness about this machine (it's pretty standard with a stock kernel) and the power management facility of modern motherboards is known as ACPI I believe so maybe APM is a bit historical these days. Not sure in other words. Anyone else know?
