The mouse did not survive interrogation.
Also mouse not pictured.
I’ve had a mouse burn my generator coils while going in while running
also mouse not pictured
😤😤😤
mouse not pictured
Got my hopes up for nothing!
I stared at that picture like it was a Where’s Wally for like 10 minutes before I came to check the comments and saw this note in OP’s message…
We are cut of the same cloth.
It’s OK I gotchu
Fun fact - he’s called that because this same thing happened to him with a dead mouse in the pc case.
Na, he was the mouse. There was so much RGB, this is what he became.
“not enough space in the used server for a standard power unit”
I wanted to put a dedicated graphics card in there for interference experiments - but the server is, well, a server - and those high availability PUs are expensive and a hell to cable manage
But a Dremel I had at hand … And a second PU as well. Now my server has a second power unit which is only powering the graphics card and is short circuited to be always-on.
self-made problems require self-made solutions.
I used to have a Ryzen 2700X based system as a server. At the time (no clue if it’s still an issue), there was a bug in the interaction between early Ryzen chips and Linux that caused the OS to lock up intermittently. I used a ATmega32u4 board to connect to the reset switch on the PC and as a USB device with a systemd unit that sends a ping to the board every 30 seconds. If the board doesn’t see a ping for a minute, it reboots the PC. It was janky as hell, but it worked for 2+ years!
That reminds me of the old story where they positioned a PC opposite from the server and taped a pen to the CD drive so that opening the CD tray presses the reset button of the server. The PC would automatically detect when the server freezes and open the CD tray. Probably just a legend but still a great example for how a silly and simple solution that just works can often times be as good if not better than a sophisticated but over engineered solution
so you reinvented watchdog?
yes, it’s a zip-tie-and-duck-tape watchdog that cost me $5
most BIOSes have it as an option though
I don’t know about “most”. It hasn’t been an option on any of the consumer motherboards I’ve used in my homelab.
Not on a computer but I had a JVC TV that started blanking a few times a minute whenever my dvd player was connected. Whilst trying to fix this I attempted to update the TV firmware. That didn’t fix a thing but I noticed that the blanking went away when the USB drive with the firmware update was plugged in. So I just plugged a cheapo USB drive in and left it there for as long as I owned that TV and dvd player.
The backup server at my parents house really did not want to run. Something kept breaking to the point that no web interface or SSH worked. Now I’m not new to self hosting, so I ran my fair share of HDMI and USB cables across my space to debug something on my server. But at my parents place it’s just that extra bit annoying, since I only bring my laptop. Finding a screen is doable, but the keyboard got me more than once. The only one they have kicking around has a freaking PS/2 cable… not even my salvaged backup hardware is old enough to support that. More than one time I had to wait for friends to get back from work so I could borrow their keyboard just to press ‘any’ key.
I decided to handle the issue by getting an IP KVM, which should help me deal with that, right? Wrong! I installed a new drive and that piece of hardware goes into some secure boot loop or whatever that is too fast for my KVM to turn on…
My WAN connection would just randomly start losing packets and would not recover, not full disconnect just lots of retries. Didn’t impact LAN just WAN. Unplugged the cable or disabling then re-enabling the interface would fix it for a coupe of days to a week then it would come back.
Time consuming to diagnose as switching cables, ports, etc would require waiting days to see if it fixed it.
Eventually had the ISP come out and swap the fiber media converter and fiber integrity. But again it came back.
After several weeks I stumbled on a FreeBDS bug that was exactly my issue…I was running OpnSense and my gateway had I225s. Applied the scripts and it worked.
I lost a raspberry pi for a couple months. Just couldn’t find the darn thing. It was working fine serving away.
Turns out it was in the basement. I forgot I moved it to be closer to my tilt Hydrometer.
Oh, good thing you wrote this. I’m about to give one of my printers away and there’s still a pi inside
Cups?
OctoPrint (3d printer)
To be fair, those things are really tiny!
Ooo, another bash mirror. Nice!
YEAH it’s bash.org
No mouse problem, but I’ve had to take measures to prevent cat-related downtime. Cats and power-button at the top is not a good combination.
When I had this problem I disconnected the power button on the motherboard.
Cant you just assign a different action to that power button instead of messing with it internally?
Connect to spray bottle aimed at… well nope.
You can for a click, but no way for the long press, as that’s handled on a lower level
You got a point. Cats are sneaky 😅
yeah what if cat does a
sudo shutdown -r nowthen we’re really in troubleTaht’s too, but that would still be better than biting the cables.
That should recover. A sneaky cat will
systemctl reboot --firmware-setup.Or just run a cpuburn to ensure that temperatures will stay at cat levels.
Did you reconnect it everytime you had to power it on?
Nah just jam a screwdriver in there to jump the pins.
You shut down your PC though?
On one computer I had a recessed reset button, so I used that as power.
Another computer I added a wire to an external button double stick taped to the back of the monitor so I can turn on both at the same time.
You sound like you are one step short of wiring up a giant lever to dramatically pull down when you want to power on the computer.
Throw the second switch!
I would like and subscribe
A lot of newer motherboards have a separate power button next to the case pinouts.
They make sprung flip-top covers specifically for this reason. It’s just a little adhesive square/circle that you stick over the power/reset button, and it has a flip-top that automatically springs closed again.
I have a small piece of acrylic sheet taped over the power and reset buttons on my server for that reason. At least I don’t have to worry about mice.
Meowy Guard. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/molly-guard
Oh, my housemates’ cat hits the front power button when he leaps off my tower. I’ve got some leather taped over it. My uptime approaches 1! I love your little weight setup, too!
Instead of cat proofing, you were supposed to get a server room dog…
I have two server room dogs. An English pit, which is my seizure dog, and a Jack Russel. They shed, especially in the summer months, and the floor sweeper gets a daily work out, as well as keeping it out of equipment enclosures. It’s not that I hate cats, they are nice as a pet in your house, just not mine. LOL
My radiator is on top so they’ve learned that’s about the only surface in the house where they’re not allowed to sleep
Aha, I disabled the LEDs by unplugging them from the motherboard, you could do the same with the power sw plugs
Optical or roller ball?
I have a strong suspicion that the answer is mammilion
That sounds like a lot. Is it more than a bajillion, or less?
Many cells
For a while, the windows machine I was using kept randomly becoming unresponsive (both via network, as well as the keyboard+mouse) and I just could not figure out why. Everytime it did, I’d have to force a shutdown by holding the power button until it shutoff, then press it again to start back up. Sometimes this happened while I wasn’t home, so it had to just stay offline until I was.
I got sick of having to do this; so I replaced the power button with a transistor and a RPI. The PI would ping the server every 5min; if it failed to get a response 3 times in a row, it would trigger the transistor for 10sec, release for 3sec, then press and release again; forcing a poweroff then starting the machine again. It’d also write these events to a log file. I think it was around twice a week ish.
Never did figure out what the cause of the lockup was; but it stopped when I replaced windows with Debian.
I just wrote a comment about a very similar setup! Glad I wasn’t the only one haha
Had a zyxel nas that got unresponsive after 10-15days of uptime, thankfully it hat a scheduled shutdown/reboot setting. Runs since 2014 with a reboot every Mondy 3am.
Heh, my router is on one of those timer plug things. No matter how frozen, it will reboot.
I’ve got an extra and don’t know what to do with it. I feel like its bad to pull power unexpectedly once a week though. Especially with a single HDD storage setup. I’d like to setup a RAID config, but its a 28TB drive and additional drives would cost me about $$$$$$$.
I have a NAS that had a similar problem, every week or two it would stop responding. From the logs it was clear that the machine was running fine after going non-responsive, but either the NIC or something else network related was crashing. However, the logs weren’t capturing the exact issue. I wrote a script to ping Google every 10 minutes, write a bunch of debug data to disc if it failed, and then reboot.
And it has never happened in the year since. I have no idea what the root cause was, but sending those pings out seems to have fixed it.
Note to any future lemmings who find this thread troubleshooting the same symptom…
- Rule out unswitched (non-chipset, direct CPU lanes) PCI connectivity and power issues by testing without specific PCI components. Unstable PCI errors can be missed during post and present later after boot, and Windows is especially bad at handling it transparently. Common culprits include GPU sag, dubious riser extensions, and anemic PSUs
- If there is a “high bandwidth” feature toggle for RAM in your BIOS settings that is currently on, try turning it off
- If your system drive is an NVMe blade with a Phizon controller, check if the manufacturer software has a firmware update available.
- If the freeze is regular but not persistent, try turning the polling rate down on your mouse, and if it’s wired, try to make sure it’s plugged into one of the board’s SOC-hosted USB 2.0 ports
I also had a machine that would randomly crash on Windows, but not on Linux.
I’m pretty sure it was some sort of hardware failure, as it also sometimes failed to boot Linux. But if it booted Linux, it would be stable until I shut it down.
Sometimes Linux handles faults better than Windows
Typically dmesg shows error when the hardware is acting up
Never did figure out what the cause of the lockup was
the mysteries of closed-source software
Yeah getting rid of windows solves many issues, LOL. I have always refused to run any server with windows, outside of being forced to at work. 😁
Using an RPi with a transistor almost seems professional… ITAPPMONROBOT
Way back in the olden days, we had a hard drive with out any backups go bad. I determined that it was the circuit board. So I took a working drive and basically connected the bad driver’s platters to the working drive’s circuit board.
It worked and I was able to back up the data and restore it on a new drive.
I hosted shit for about ten years before really understanding how local dns worked.
Imagine a primitive society that discovered literally every major modern scientific achievement, but somehow missed the wheel. That’s basically how my first setup went lol.
I have a feeling there’s a point in time where most non-it self-hosters got fed up with ads and installed pihole, then learned about DNS. I have a feeling that started about five years ago.
Now it’s probably hand in hand with how necessary a pihole is.
I have heard of local DNS multiple times now and been selfhosting for many years, but I’m good with my 192.168.178.39 :)
Well hello there, fellow Fritz-Box user :D
It opened the door to pihole and unbound, then dns certs, man… everything’s so nice now lol
I do not self host. I just wandered in here. Do you have suggested resources to learn more about DNS? I feel like generally searching shit sucks to get an answer like that lately.
A dns server knows what and where things are. That’s its only real job, to tell who’s asking where say, http://eff.org/ is.
“Ay homie, where’s https://eff.org/?”
over here - 173.239.79.200
“thanks, bud!”
The issue is, the dns server you use by default is under the control of whoever your provider is, and as a result, they get all of your dns lookups like the example above as well as every porn site, every piracy site, everywhere.
Installing your own, or simply moving to one your provider has no business with like 9.9.9.9 can help keep your dns queries more private, go a step further and use encrypted dns, as many providers supply, and you’ll be even further covered.
Installing your own, however, comes with the added perk of being able to apply your own dns entries. Suddenly local addresses can have custom names without ever touching a hosts file. Neat! Use DNS certs and you’ve got local SSL!
I would go find something applicable to feed you for a dns 101, but my old resources don’t exist. I just know stuff from years of doing it and failing over and over until things work.
Thanks man
Then you tell people about it on IRC and become known as “the dead mouse guy”.
But the maximum nickname length on the IRC server is limited, so you settle for “deadmau5” as your nick.
