My linux server, an AMD Duron 1200 at the end of a consumer DSL line, hosting riverside-cafe.com, was off the air most of the weekend.
I had occasion to reboot and the system wouldn’t come up. Wouldn’t even POST; it just sat there. I quickly figured out that clearing the CMOS memory would allow the system to come up. It would reboot cleanly 2-3 times, then need the memory cleared.
Hmm, motherboard or case, I wondered? Figuring many problems are a result of power supply deficiencies, I decided the new Antec Sonata was a good choice.
Installed mobo and video card, but no lan and no disks. System rebooted with absolutely no problems. Added drives and lan and the problem came back. To make a long story short, it was a defective lan card!
Oh, and why did I have occasion to reboot a normally quite reliable linux box? Seems that I had some how corrupted my root reiserfs based system to such a degree that fsck couldn’t cope.
I got a new harddrive, and mirrored (cp -ax) the root drive to the new drive. Guess my lilo skills are rusty, as I had to boot from my emergency disk and twiddle with lilo for some time before the system booted.
But, all is better now, and as usual, I’ve learned a thing or two along the way.