I had a bit of bumpy week this past week. It all worked itself out by Wednesday evening, and gave me some peace, but it was certainly a stressful time. It all began, literally at the very end of a great weekend last Sunday.
So, after finally getting to a state of peace and resolution with regards to my aquarium situation and stresses involved with that, and a couple of weeks after my whole microwave debacle, last weekend was turning out to be extremely peaceful and a much needed break. I was even able to finish replacing a ceiling fan I had been installing in my library (more on that next time) and it was working great. All in all, it was proving to be very fulfilling. Well, all of that came to a screeching halt right as I was starting to get set for the night, shut off my computer, and get ready for bed on Sunday evening.
As I went into my computer room to shutdown my main computer, I saw a notification that my file server was not on. I wasn't immediately put off by this, since Sundays are its usual update day, and it would not be beyond the realm of possibility for it to not come up right away afterwards. Naturally, I turned it back on and waited for it to come back up. Now, this file server is a headless one with no monitor, keyboard, or mouse hooked up to it. So, I couldn't really monitor its status in the boot process, but it seemed to come back up like normal. About 30 seconds after finishing its boot sequence, it shuts back off. Now I'm starting to get a little worried. I just rebuilt this entire server 3 months ago because of problems resulting from outdated hardware that needed replacing. Needless to say, it should have been a very stable machine at this point. Now remember, this is all going down on Sunday night as I was getting ready to tone down for the night and relax.
I try a couple more times to turn it on, and each time it shuts down more and more quickly. I open up the side panel of the case to see if anything out of the ordinary catches my eye, and sure enough my eye is immediately drawn to a motionless processor fan. For any not up to speed at all on basic computer components, processor temperatures during normal activities are extraordinarily high. So high, in fact, that unaided they will fry themselves. The usual solution for this is a combination heat-sink (big chunk of metal) and fan that is attached to the top of the processor to dispose of the heat it generates. Other more aggressive solutions involve water cooling (similar to a car radiator) or even vapor cooling; but I digress.
So, now that I know what the problem likely is I'm taken aback a bit. As I said, this is all new equipment, and I have never had problems with AMD processors or the fans that they are packaged with. So, for a fan to go out after 3 months caught me by surprise. I pulled up my handy warranty tracking website that I use for managing all of my various warranties (Warranty Elephant) , and looked up my processor. Sure enough it came with a 3 year warranty, but I wasn't sure if that included the fan as well. As they were not available on Sundays, and the fact that I didn't really trust their fans at this point, I jumped onto NewEgg and ordered a better fan that would likely arrive in a few days.
On the next day I gave AMD a call thinking I should at least follow up with them, even though I've already started the process of replacing the fan with a better one. When all was said and done, they processed the warranty request and shipped out a replacement one as well. In the end I had both fans sitting on my doorstep on Wednesday afternoon. I hooked the better one up and turned the server back on with my fingers permanately crossed in hope. Sure enough the new fan worked beautifully, and everything went back to normal. After a couple hours updating all my stuff, and running a few backups, I was good to go. Another good thing is that I have a spare fan from AMD for if this ever happens again.
Hopefully after all of the turmoil these past 4 weeks (in a row!!!) I can finally have a bit of real peace, and this weekend will not throw anymore roadblocks in my way. By the way my fingers are still crossed...
Cheers.
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