Acerbic.org

The motherboard it's running off of has a blown trace, a very blown trace. Back when I upgraded Discworld to the K6-2 I wanted to test the mobo first so I set it up outside of a case, plugged in a harddrive, did a linux install and let it run on the internal netowork for a week, just to make sure everything would work. It ran just fine and when I was getting ready to shut it down and do the swap I somehow shorted two of the leads on the underside of the board together and sparks flew! After the smoke cleared (literally) I saw that I had blown a trace off the motherboard, actually blew it up off of the motherboard. Right near the short, an area below that trace sorta exploded cutting the metalic strip and blowing it off the motherboard (it was still connected a few inches down) and I spent the next two hours trying to solder it back down, using too large of a solering iron and the wrong type of solder. I eventually suceeded in getting a small blob of solder to stick in the right spot with the loose trace attached. Suprisingly the system booted just fine after the fix. I ran it for another week like that, when it didn't die I, carefully, shut it down and sucessfully transplanted it into discworld's case and it's been running reliably for over a year now. Computers are weird.

About Discworld

Discworld is the name of the server your using right now. Discworld is also the setting for a massively sucessful series of novels by Terry Pratchett. This is not a coincidence. In the books Discworld is a disc shaped planet that sits atop the backs of four giant elephants, who in turn stand upon the back of an even more giant turtle, the Great A'Tuin. Discworld is a magical place, and a funny place. Often times things don't quite work right, or work but in a very unexpected, and unexplainable way. As this pretty much describes how computers work it seemed like the perfect name for a server to me ;->

You can find more information on Discworld (the books) at L-Space which is by far the best online Discworld resource I've found. Enjoy!

The drawing of Tux in the upper left was found at Elizabeth Jordan's Tux Gallery and slightly altered by yours truely to give him an Apache feather to play with. If you like Tux, or penguins in general you should check out her collection, it's one of the best I've seen.

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