Hardware Hell

I'm getting to old for this. It's scary but I actually thought that yesterday. Nate and I had begun with high hopes and anticipation for a successful day of hardware toil. A great pile of parts would hopefully yield us a few machines- boy were we wrong... The parts in question included the old Everything Server A dual P2/266 badly in need of a clean reinstall after a year of being beaten and tortured by a pair of the most brutal sysadmins on the planet. The case rattled terribly and the power switch doesn't work. The other machine was destined to be my new child- I intended it to be an MP3 player for my bedroom so I could free my old laptop up from the shackles of being a server, and actually use it in the living room as a terminal. This new machine was really a pile of parts. It didn't really have a chance since it was to replace another machine that I (ahem) blew up. Our house has electricity created by nazis as a torture system for hardware. We've had at least 5 motherboards blow up in this house. But not today. Today we have a gigantic UPS providing pure electricity to the desk.

Our quest began. We swapped the dual board into a new case and hooked everything up. But for reasons that we couldn't determine, nothing seemed to work. Problems with the case? We get power, but no video. No beeps for crying out loud. So it goes back into the old case. I wack on the new motherboard for a bit, and we swap parts back and forth until we determine that the CPU is fine, the dimms are fine, the vid cards and harddrives are fine.

6 hours later we basically had the first machine rebuilt- but this time with 2 9 gig hard drives isntead of one, and a new sound card. The other machine lies dormant- it needs a 100mhz dimm if I ever expect it to spring to life. The new machine won't play mp3s, but it does have a fresh clean install.

The casualties: Nate got a really sweet blood blister trying to cut some wire ties. We confirmed that my motherboard was defintiely toast (I'm not sure why the smoke didn't convince me last time). And 6 hours were shot.

It's disturbing. I spent 2 years working tech support. I swapped motherboards and through hard drives in and out of machines blindfolded. I swapped simms, trouble shooted hardware and fixed pretty much every conceivable problem that you could think of. As I left, Pentiums were finally the standard. Since then the PPros and P2s have come along, and virtually all the knowledge I amassed is obsolete. I need to hire a 17 year old to do the things I did when I was 17. I just want to mess with the software- I want the hardware to just magically be upgraded and fixed by elves late at night under cover of darkness.

Am I lazy? Maybe. I still get some sort of pleasure out of seeing piles of parts that I can swap around. Of course this time the parts are mine, and if they blow up, I pay the penalties instead of corporate america, so maybe its the extra stress that makes it harder. Maybe hardware is just getting more complicated. Or maybe I'm just getting dumber. Or just older. Maybe my patience is just gone. Maybe I just had a bad day. Its strange that I've replaced hundreds of hard drives and mother boards, and then seem to have lost the touch. Is it bad Hardware Karma?

oh well, the case isn't rattling. We put some books on it and the vibrations stop. I'll throw a 2.2 kernel on it and get that SMP kung foo going. My pile-of-parts however, well, lets just hope for those late night elves. My karma is used up for this lifetime- I'm sticking to perl. But I do have a 32x SCSI cd-rom drive for ripping, and 18 more gigs to put mp3s. Mmmmm.... I will be a vegetable.