I hate hardware failures. I hate them even more when they happen when I am busy with other things and don’t have the time or the mood to deal with such unexpected situations.

Well, this is all about my home server’s CPU fan that suddenly decided to stop working in the middle of the night. That old CPU (Pentium II) is a bit overclocked and the last thing I would wish is to discover a fried chip. This could turn the old computer to a useless piece of hardware or would require me to go hunting for a replacement chip… Fortunately, I discovered this problem this afternoon, after checking my monitoring software (Cacti) by luck. At the same time, I realized that an alert system, within Cacti, would prove to be extremely useful in such occasions.

Anyway, this is the graph that shows the CPU fan go down… I must admit that the fan did try to continue doing its job :-)

(This image is hosted on Yahoo! Flickr)

Fortunately, I replaced the faulty fan with another one and this issue was resolved without any further problems. Maybe it’s time to re-consider any other monitoring software alternatives.

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Tags: Hardware