[gentoo-amd64] Re: What went wrong

[Duncan]

Peter Humphrey <prh@××××××××××.uk> posted
200701161712.44900.prh@××××××××××.uk, excerpted below, on  Tue, 16 Jan
2007 17:12:44 +0000:

> To cap it all, today both the on-board Ethernet ports stopped working and
> I had to slot in a spare PCI card.

Are you sure your power to wherever you plugin is good?  What about the
onboard power supply?  Is it heavy duty enough to run the RAID and the
system and...?  It's UL (or equivalent in your area) listed for the rated
wattage, right?  What about handling?  You take appropriate static
elimination steps during handling, correct?

As you can already tell from the above, that string of bad luck, with all
that stuff failing, just doesn't seem normal to me.  I once lived on a
mission 50 miles from town, with /bad/ power.  This was back in the 80s,
but we had things like the Commodore64, and the one guy's string of luck
with that thing sure sounds like the historic equivalent of what you just
said.  If it wasn't one thing going wrong, it was another.  He'd have the
thing going a couple days and pow, it'd be out for service for a couple
weeks... or months... depending on whether they had to back-order whatever
it was.

At the same time, the phones out there were failed more than they were
working.  A lot of the time the things would constantly buzz/low-ring.  We
discovered the fastest way to get service was to keep them plugged in
anyway, as that disrupted service further up the line and they'd send a
repair truck out.  We ended up with one of those styrofoam coolers,
stuffed with pillows to deaden the sound further, the buzzing phone in the
center, with the lid on and the thing taped shut.

I went away to school after a year or so, only visiting, but my folks
stayed there for eight years.  By the time they left, there was even a
paved road going by about a mile away, and they'd upgraded both power and
phone so they actually worked as they were designed to work.

So anyway, every time I read about the problems of rural broadband, I
think of that place.  If they can get broadband there, pretty much
everywhere else should have already gotten it.

Back to your situation, however.  It's not electrical spikes from either
the power or whatever broadband you have killing everything, right?  Your
story just sounded too familiar.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

-- 
gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list