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!
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