So today I woke up to find a nasty surprise. At almost an exact year since my first hospitalisation (the year will be this night), Enterprise died.
I think it might just be the PSU giving up, as it does not turn on even the led light on the mainboard, but at this point, I’d say “who knows?”. My mother seen a “flash of light”, heard a BIIP from the UPS, and the computer turned off. I cannot turn it back on.
The UPS did likely cut the whole power as the external HD also was turned off when I woke up, but the HD itself is fine. the UPS is also charged, so that’s not it.
It’s the worst timing ever for my computer to break down. Not only I have my SSH key for the vserver on it (I can get it out probably, but that’s beside the point), but I also cannot do my job without that. Okay, it was planned already that I wouldn’t be working until after surgery, but it’s a bit of a problem if I cannot replace Enterprise in the mean time.
I was already planning on a replacement (which will obviously be called Yamato), and I have a components list I can look at right now, from Alternate (K&M does not carry Opterons, nor I can find those in Italy). The problem is that it’s around €2K.
So if anybody is willing to help me gathering the money, I’d be certainly happy, as I won’t be able to do work until middle of september, if not even later, and without Enterprise, I cannot do any kind of F/LOSS work, that means no Gentoo, no xine, no optimisation of smaller projects. If I can get the money, I’d be doing even more work on that as it will take very little time to run the build on Yamato.
Sorry for the request, but this really looks to me like an emergency, as it happened at the very worst time :/
Update: cutting out the hardware RAID 5 support I can get the price down to €1300 which is much more feasible.
The only way to send donations for Yamato is paypal?
Nope, if you prefer wire transfer you can mail me to get the coordinates :)Thanks!
I’m not sure why you need a system that expensive when you’re asking for money for it. Perhaps you should just ask for money for a new PSU.In any case, if you do want a new system, I just bought a new quad-core setup for work for under USD$1000, with an Intel Q9450 CPU.
I have spare PSUs but the problem is I have no idea what caused the PSU to go bad, I’m afraid it might be the motherboard to be bad (it has to be an internal cause rather than external, as the UPS is fine, as well as the disk).The problem here is mostly the timing; a system upgrade was already planned on my side, and I am waiting money from an employer of mine covering most of it, but with me going in and out of hospitals right now, I’ll have to wait for them until october or such, and most of my availability is currently occupied by hospital-related expenses.And I’d rather take a full blown system ready to go on for a few more years than a cheap one that can easily be overthrown in price in a few months (and I don’t trust Intel desktop CPUs, sincerely, never had).This is mostly because it costs me to get the pieces from Germany, which means I avoid doing incremental updates, and if I were to buy them in Italy, I’d be spending the same amount of money for a basic dual core.(and of course, if I were to get the same configuration from Newegg, it would probably cost $1200…)
Ma chiamare un computer Yamato non è un po’ “rischioso” 😀 (sia le corazzate che le glasse Galaxy non se la passano mica benissimo con quel nome).Spero che la donazione sia arrivata ^_^
Here’s the specs for a system I just built for myself, which will hopefully last at least 3 years, maybe more like 5.Intel DG35EC MotherboardAntec Power SupplyIntel Core2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz4GB DDR2 RAM2x 250GB 7200RPM disksSATA DVD BurnerNow, the motherboard has onboard video (dvi and analog), gigabit ethernet, and 6ch sound. Nothing fancy, but it just works. Also, it has plenty of ram and cpu horsepower, at least for me.It hasn’t locked up on me once since I bought it. I suspend it to ram every single night, and it has never failed to come back up. All running gentoo amd64, of course. I used to be a big AMD fan, but I gave Intel a try (all due to their open-source friendlyness) this time around. I could not be more pleased. This machine is screaming fast.All of that cost me a little more than $600 USD, with tax and shipping. I bought it in May 2008.I’m curious what you’re going for with a €1300 system. At least at the price I bought my system for, I’d be happy to donate a cpu, or a couple of hard disks, or whatever. You’re a great developer, and you deserve our support. I’m just really curious what kind of system you’re looking at getting.
I hope you get a usable system up and running again soon. Good luck with it!
BTW: Why were you going for hardware RAID support ?On my 6000+, SW RAID works great.Hint:If you are aiming for AMD sys, get yourself Phenom ( 9850 is decent and cheap) and one of those new SB750 based boards.I’m waiting for the successor of DFI’s LANPARTY UT 790FX-M2R. Check the specs:http://us.dfi.com.tw/Produc…Greatest plus of this board are IMHO Marvell’s NIC chips instead of Realtek.Otherwise, newest Foxconn A79A-S should also be very fine, but it is expensive.Such boards will have 6+2 SATA ports, which is more than enough for decent RAID, and not very expensive…