It’s been a long time since my computer broke down and my absence online has been gut-wrenching. Seems like everything around me is breaking down too – must be something in the air.
My Mac server has been spinning its little hard discs now for a couple of years at this domain name. From spam attacks, lightning and regular power outages from American Electric, the little box has kept on clicking – until sometime around mid-October.
That’s when I checked my blog and saw the ugly – “page cannot be found” scenario that shows up when there’s a problem.
I called in the troops too. Danny and I replaced the hard drives, the video cards, the memory and various cables to no avail. I was worried the hard drives were burned up, but after several trips to various locations to A/B the parts to the old G4, we finally assumed it was either a power supply or a motherboard.
Now there were plenty of hours troubleshooting already and instead of diving even deeper into the technical matrix, I decided to go ahead and buy a new computer from eBay and it arrived today. Fortunately, old G4 computers sell for less than $200 and FedEx brought the box today with free shipping.
When I got home, I removed the packaged, put my old hard drives in the computer, replaced the video card and plugged everything in and shazam – here we are again and it’s good to give my fat fingers a place to pontificate, vent and act like there’s an audience – for those that wondered – it’s good to be back.
Here’s a few pics from the surgery too.
It’s worth noting though that I’m seriously considering getting out of the server business and moving to the cloud. There’s no reason for me to chase after hardware maintence anymore and the prices for managed hosting and upgrades continue to get cheaper. Besides, I’ve figured out that I can buy lifetime hosting too. After all, if I fizzle out this week due to some brain hemorage, it would be nice to know that someone kept the lights on. Details to follow…