I appear to have broken the server that scribcam.co.uk resides in. That’s an annoyance.

Oddly, it’s still “up”, as it responds to pings, and some functionality such as being able to access the files, is working. The webserver itself is also up, as can be seen by the siles I hosted for Wayne the other day. I used that example because of the largeish video files hosted on there, which download perfectly.

It would appear that anything that takes the slightest bit of processing power, such as the webcam, is not working. The webcam, which normally takes a photo every 15 seconds, has taken six pictures since midnight (it’s now 3AM). PHP generated pages do not work, and I can’t connect to MySQL.

VNC doesn’t work either, so I can’t actually see what’s wrong with it. The machine doesn’t have a monitor connected. VNC takes at least 2-3 minutes to login or even ask for a password prompt. Eventually once it goes in, it just shows black, but the mouse pointer is there.

A morning of fun ensues. Sigh.

UPDATE:

It’s the morning. Predictably, I have the computer all set up on the desk, and guess what? It’s working like a charm. The annoying little bastard. I’m editing this particular post on said machine to prove it.

I rebooted it twice this morning. Each time, it worked for a short amount of time, maybe 10 seconds. I was able to open up VNC Viewer, and connect to it, but seconds later, the connection would hand, and I couldn’t reconnect.

I tried a few things which I thought may have been an issue. I restarted the web and database server, thinking that may have caused it to hang, as there’s a particularly large database on there at the moment. Nope. The webserver started instantly, and the database server was up in ~20 seconds.

Now that I have a monitor and keyboard connected, I might take this opportunity to overhaul it, reinstall later versions of the server software, etc. It depends whether I can get connected now that I know the machine is actually functioning as it should.

UPDATE THE SECOND

I’ve gone a bit further with the “upgrade” than originally planned. And I think I need counselling.

After installing the SATA drivers for this machine, I received messages that there was no SATA drive connected. How could this be? I heard it spin up. I couldn’t think of ANY reason why the drive wouldn’t be connected.

The SATA cable was dangling in front of the monitor, not plugged into the motherboard. I’m going senile.

UPDATE THE TURD

This is my last update on this post, and I can confirm a few things. Firstly, my senility thankfully wasn’t as bad as I made out. It turns out that even though the drive was disconnected from the motherboard, it didn’t actually power up anyway. The drive is fine, as I’d taken it from Beastbits. It was the only SATA drive I had to hand with a molex connector. I have yet to test whether it’s a fault with the drive as I just use the SATA power connector on here. It could explain why I had issues in the past with SATA drives on that machine, thinking it was just a Win2000 thing. I never actually thought to check to see if the machines were detected in the BIOS. Whoops.

Secondly, the machine is back up and running completely, and sadly, it’s one of those things which will never be solved. As expected, after its trip onto “the bench”, everything worked like a dream. I’ll just catalogue the bollocks I tried just in case it makes a difference.

Updated TightVNC server to the latest version. I doubt this helped, as the machine has been running for four years with the same version with no issue.

DROPped several backup databases, including one with a ~1Gb table in it. I doubt this was causing an actual problem, however, as I manually start the SQL server whever I reboot the machine. I can’t think of a reason why this would cause a problem during bootup.

Defragged. Come on, this never fixed anything, but I did it anyway. Expecially on a machine with 5Gb used out of 60Gb. Admittedly, this went down to 3.something after I dropped those databases.

Basically, I can only put it down to the fact that the machine wanted a change of scenery. There was no logical reason I can think of for its temporary failure.

This is one of those things that will bug me. It’s one of those annoying problems that surfaced for no reason, and will eventually resurface ONLY while I’m pissed. You know, the only reason this problem originally surfaced was because I rebooted the machine after 16 days uptime. OK, it’s not much for a server, but I reboot it every so often because Conquercam stops recording images after 42 days.

Nobody who reads this blog will have constructive feedback on this posting, or any logical ideas of what happened.