As I was writing the previous entry, our trusty server that has been hosting this blog started to get (to use a technical term) flaky. It kept spontaneously shutting down, sometimes after only a couple of hours of uptime. Shutting down? No, not quite. Just hanging. On, but none of the lights blinking, no network connection, and most annoyingly: no logs to figure out what was wrong.
So not being able to figure out the specifics, I’ve taken the “big hammer” approach and built a new one. Much the same details as before, but everything bigger and newer. Roughest system build I’ve done for a while, too. At first the new system was flakier than the old one, and I couldn’t even get the OS installed from its thumb drive. I discovered later that the thumb drive itself was corrupt, which is disappointing given that I’d bought it that morning at the local office supplies shop. Fortunately we were able to scrounge up a replacement that worked. The big stability problem appeared to be that the BIOS was clocking the new DRAM too fast. I bought good 5200MHz DRAM because that was what the processor said that it wanted. I was annoyed that the BIOS was only running it at 4800MHz, and that things were flaky. Everything has been fine ever since I knocked it down to 4200MHz. So I suppose that means that the motherboard must be rubbish? I’m starting to suspect so.
The next trick on the bring-up was that FreeBSD didn’t recognize the Ethernet chip on the motherboard. A bit of reading of forums suggested that there was a non-mainline driver that worked, so I built that on the old machine and sneaker-neted it across to the new one. Per the warnings I had to disable the checksum offload “features”, because they did indeed not work. Very glad that I sprung for a new power supply, rather than attempting to re-use the old one: useful to have the old system online the whole time.
Still, those couple of issues taken care of it (touch wood) seems to be rock solid and doing everything that’s been asked of it. Running pretty cool too, which is probably on account of all of the fans in it.
The camera batteries, chargers and CF-B cards all showed up eventually, as did the new laptop, so I think that we’re set for travel-tech.
Warm clothes (thermals, layers) also showed up, and seem to fit.
Cath’s just read that it’ll be -37C in Svalbard while we’re there, so I hope we’ve got enough!
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