CPU fans (by alaric)
Ugh. The CPU fan on my home file server died on Monday. I'd been suspicious of it in the past, since the machine kept hangling oddly, but opening it up showed a fine spinning fan, so I assumed it was just bad luck.
But the day before the kernel paniced deep within VFS locking code, during a dump. And after a reboot, gcc threw a signal 11 and died, but worked when run again. Then the machine paniced again on Monday. so I rebooted into the BIOS to look at the hardware monitors (the NetBSD envstat drivers didn't find anything they liked in my chipset, alas) and found the CPU at 75 degrees.
Uhoh!
So I opened it up, and indeed found the fan non-spinning. Obviously, it needed removing, but could I? No. The damned thing was rather unremovable:
After giving up on it myself, I took it in to visit my friend Seth, who is good with this kind of thing. After a bit of wrestling, he managed to prise the thing off. But would the motherboard have survived the strain of the two of us hammering at it, plus the trip into London and back?
Today, I picked up a new fan, and put it in. All was good, except that the little handle fouled where the DIMMs go:
...so had to be bent at a bit.
And lo, the machine doesn't boot. Just beeps rhythmically.
SIGH.
I'm going to replace it with a FANLESS mini-ITX board - that'll go into an ATX case, I gather...
Thu 27th Oct 2005 2:47 pm 
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