11:30 am. Suddenly the music stops. "Hmm, that’s weird. Oh, my remote desktop connection is gone too. Hmm. What was that? Let’s reconnect." 15 minutes later: "Ok, what happened? Where is my NAS and why can’t I connect to my other PC’s? Oops, now the connection is gone altoghether". This is what happened this morning at my work. I turned on my iLounge 24×7 radio there and suddenly it was gone. I could log-in at my server (just once) and after that it was dead. Help! Man Server down! Call 911! All day long I could not connect at all. First I figured it might be my router since it has been acting a bit flaky lately. But when I got home all the other computers seemed to be working just fine: except my webserver. One look at my alarm clock reveiled that I must have had a power outage. Everything mus have been rebooting at the same time. But my webserver was not starting at all no matter how many times I pushed the button. Damn!
Off course the diagnosis was easy: my power supply had died. Again I should say because it died on me about 2 years ago as well and so did the one in my game PC (Pentium 4, 2.8ghz HT). They are definately not the most reliable part of my PC’s I guess. Off course I knew that I know had to dismantle my PC to rip it out and replace it. Lucky me: I had been tinkering with a old PC from my work: a defect Compaq 800mHz Athlon. So I just jacked the power supply from that, put it into my server and presto! It is working again! Probably I will buy a better one tomorrow because this one lacks the extra outlet for a monitor so now I had to get another power cable to hook my 17″ Acer up.
Now, the question that remains is, did the power supply cause a shortage and that’s why everything rebooted, or did a power outage/shortage cause the power supply to die? Hmm, there is a nice chicken/egg problem.