Grace and Truth and Technology » bummer

Coffee mixes with many things…but not electronics

Dave Stone — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:39:56 +0000

A few weeks ago, one of our recently installed digital soundboards (Yamaha LS9) was having trouble booting up. It kept referencing a missing file of some sort. After a few days of unsuccessful troubleshooting with Yamaha, Chip received permission from them to open the unit and peek inside. This is what he saw:

Fortunately for us, Chip is amazing. He used warm soapy water and cleaned out the spilled coffee from the chassis as well as on the circuit boards. He gave them time to dry, buttoned up the board and viola! it booted right up! Thank you, Lord!

Accidents happen. You might think the moral of the story is that you can reduce the damage accidents cause by not mixing liquids with electronics. Indeed, that is a corollary. But the true moral of the story is that Chip Roebuck is amazing!

Fan-less power supply needed a fan

Dave Stone — Mon, 07 May 2007 17:40:01 +0000

Apparently, Infrant’s line of storage devices had a design flaw. The fanless power supply unit needed a fan. Or at least more space in which to breathe. Three days after installing their patch which increased the fan speed from 1600 rpm to 2100 rpm the power supply died (see charred copper coil in photo). To their credit, they advised customers when the problem was discovered to be widespread. New power supply is in and the RAID volume is re-synching due to the improper shutdown when it died.

webhost4life never again

Dave Stone — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:35:52 +0000

Never use webhost4life. I tried to renew my hosting package and a domain name and they would not take my money. I could tell you more reasons why you should never use them but I’ve already wasted enough time with them.

catastrophe at the web host

Dave Stone — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:51:00 +0000

so, last Friday, while installing a PC for a user, I noticed that http://www.bethel-church.org was not responding. Odd, but not disconcerting…yet. After calling support, I learn that a server is down. Turns out the RAID array on which my website existed completely died…not just a single disk, but somehow the whole array went kaput. Fortunately, the webhost kept backups of my data. Unfortunately, the most recent backup was over 4 months old. Unacceptable. I’ve been planning to move to another web host with the next site redesign but have now already begun the process. This latest incident hot-glued the last nail in the coffin.

The new web host offers 100GB of space and 1TB of bandwidth. Initial tests have yielded decent speeds, though not with dotnetnuke.
What web host do you use and what do they offer?

PS> if you really want to know the host, use the command line tool tracert on bethel-church.org before August 10, 2006 (maybe sooner).