Back online!
2nd October 2022
After an extremely long time offline, this blog is alive/online again!
There’s still a ton of maintenance work needed, but at least it’s accessible again 
.
The blog went offline in early April 2021 – because the trusty physical server at home, built sometime before 2008 from off-the-shelf components, finally malfunctioned badly enough to not be fixable remotely over ssh.
(Or maybe it was still fixable, but at 13+ years old I thought it’s better not to fix anymore.)
It had previously survived (and recovered from) several hardware failures:
- (there might have been earlier failures that I no longer remember)
- PSU: after showing higher-than-normal deviations from standard voltages (+.3V, 5V, and 12V), the PSU died with a puff of smoke. It was replaced with a comparably cheap ATX PSU, that served fine for many more years.
- CPU fan failure: as the CPU heatsink was rather small, even with powersave CPU mode it was still getting too hot – so I had to shut it down and wait until I was able to replace the fan.
- OS disk: the server started with an old 320GB Seagate. When SMART data started deteriorating (unreadable/remapped sectors), I have swapped it out for a small and cheap 60GB Kingston SSD.
- Second CPU core: that server used a rather old dual-core AMD Athlon X2. I think it was old back when it was installed
. At some point second core (#1) was showing 100% usage, and the server would restart within some minutes after booting. I am still surprised and impressed this was fixable remotely! Maybe the issue wasn’t too bad if the server could still boot and last for a few minutes. The fix was to disable the problematic core permanently from within Linux.
That chapter is over now.
Will the new chapter bring more regular posting?
Other, non-text content?…
We’ll see
