Autarchy of the Private Cave

Tiny bits of bioinformatics, [web-]programming etc

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    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 :D . 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 :)

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