💾 Archived View for skyjake.fi › gemlog › 2021-08_cable-mismanagement.gmi captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:19:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Cable Mismanagement

skyjake.fi was offline for about 15 hours, but is up and running again.

In a rather peculiar sequence of events, a small box full of batteries, screws, dice, and other small items fell from a bookshelf nearby and landed directly on the server PC. The box in question hadn't been touched in days, so I was rather surprised that it suddenly decided to take a plunge. Immediately following the impact, the PC started making a loud rattle but the noise subsided after a while. I was busy looking after my son and filed the incident as suspicious but not something that required immediate attention.

Well, I continued having a busy evening so I didn't follow up on this until the sharp smell of overheated dust started permeating the house. And sure enough, the PC was still running but the CPU heat sensors were at maximum levels. I shut down the PC but didn't have time to investigate further right away. This took down the skyjake.fi capsule, Mastodon instance, my Gitea server, and other services proxied through the system (e.g., Weblate and Lagrange's LibreTranslate instance).

This morning I opened the case up for examination. Turns out an unused power cable had come loose and stuck itself into the CPU fan. I did recall hearing minor rattles every now and then — some part of the cable may have been in contact with the fan already before. I removed the accumulated dust, applied a zip tie to hold the cable in place, and turned the machine back on.

Fortunately, everything was still working fine. I was worried a data migration was in the cards, and tentatively planned to move the disks to another PC and run them inside a VM. However, this machine is only five years old so it should have another five before something serious starts falling apart.

(Note to self: keep the shelves and cables better organized!)

📅 2021-08-24

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