I had a scary moment at lunch today with my server I use to
stream my music which is separate of course from my Web Server or my someday to
be presented to the Internet game server.
What happened
was I went to line up a few songs to listen too while at lunch and hit the KVM
switch to go to the music server and the mouse would not work. Well no big deal
but all of the sudden I couldn’t connect to any of my systems via the KVM.
This KVM draws power off of the system
booted in the number one position. I think it also seems to sync the mouse and
keyboard for the others as well. I had run into this before but I couldn’t get
around it this time.
I then decided to “Remote Desktop”
in from another system and control the music from there but my KVM started
giving an annoying beep and wasn’t cleanly going to the other systems even
though I rebooted them to sync with the KVM.
So I decide to reboot my music
sever only thing is that it gave 4 or 5 beeps and didn’t boot. I then checked
the connections and it got to SCSI bios but took forever to get past that and
boot the OS. Now I’m thinking my boot drive may need replacing.
Finally I decided to take my system
outside to the backyard and show it whose boss! That’s right I took that air
can out there and blew all of the little dust balls out (there was mucho dust
balls).
I disconnected all cables
especially the SCSI cables to my hard drives and blew them out and reconnected.
Doing this helped me notice that one of the SCSI connectors was slightly up off
of the connector.
I attribute the cable slightly
being off the connector to moving all of the systems down on my rack narrowing
the space between them and then having my music server cables brushed by the
system above it as I slid that system above it in and out of the rack. I had
left the top cover off of my music server and the cable sticking up slightly so
I could observe a new type of CPU fan.
Well after blowing the dust out and
reseating the connections everything came up speedily and working fine! I then tucked
the cables down and placed the top back on my music server to keep the dust out
and prevent bumping items in the system.
Just another lesson to place items
back the way you need them when done with testing!
