Unexpected Computer Surgery
So I didn't start today with any great plans. Practice music, maybe some grocery shopping. Caught up on some gemini capsules and Hacker News, where I found a interesting post, "Hating AI is good, actually," [1] and was thinking about posting some of my thoughts on the subject (spoiler: I'm happy to be left behind; I'm not entirely confident that rocket ship is space-worthy and I don't really trust the captains).
[1] Hating AI is good, actually
But life had other plans for me. I glanced at my VOIP phone on my desk and noticed the microbrowser page I set up wasn't loading. Tried to log in to lily (my asterisk PBX box) and couldn't connect. Something's wrong... So I had breakfast.
After breakfast I investigated. Lily was off and wouldn't turn back on. Took her to the bench and looked inside. Bulging caps. She's been running an Intel Celeron board that was made around 2001, so despite running smoothly for many years, it was bound to fail eventually.
Tried swapping another board in (an ABit dual Celeron) and another, slightly larger power supply. It would boot, but powered off shortly after. Figured the dual Celeron needed more power. Upgrade time. Ordered a new supply on Amazon along with a new SSD drive. Figured I'd go whole hog and ordered a newer motherboard combo on eBay (that still had PCI slots for the asterisk card). They won't come until next week, so in the meantime...
I just happened to have suitable capacitors for the bad ones. They were 1500uF 6.3V caps, 7 of them. I had some 10V Rubycons. So I warmed up the soldering iron and popped the bad ones off and soldered the new rubys in. Put it all back together, swapping the 128MB RAM sticks for 256MB from the dual Celeron board, and started her up. Runs great again.
I'll still do the upgrade, since she's still running CentOS 5 and Asterisk 11. But this will still be a nice retro box for a while to come. And the caps probably cost me less than $10.
So maybe tomorrow I can do that AI piece and do something more fun than computer surgery. Just no surprise breakdowns. At least until my bank account heals.