[llamabeast]

This post is no more than technical ramblings about what happened to the LlamaServer this week.

Okay, so on Monday the mail server, which is run by hostgator.com, apparently went down due to Ike. On coming back online the mailbox had 35000 error messages in it.

The LlamaServer code was written, I guess, slightly foolishly, in that every minute another instance of it would start up, and try to download the mail (I've now fixed this so it couldn't happen again). Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but being as the massive mailbox took essentially forever to download, I guess none of these processes could finish. So I imagine perhaps CPU load climbed to 100%, and then the computer overheated and died.

But the weird thing is how I fixed it. The computer wouldn't boot at all - not a single thing appeared on the screen. So I systematically disconnected all the components and tested if it would boot after each one (I'd given up hope to be honest, and already started researching costs for a new machine on the internet, but I thought I might as well check). I got down to just having the RAM left. There are two 512MB sticks.

I took the front one out. It still wouldn't boot. I took the back one out too. Wouldn't boot (unsurprisingly). I put the one from the back in the front slot. It booted! Miracle! (I can't tell you how happy I was!) Then I put the other one (which at this point I had concluded must be faulty) in the back slot. Still worked! Then I put everything else back in, and it remains fine. So the only net change is that I swapped the RAM sticks over.

Anyone have any thoughts on this oddness? Perhaps it will just remain a mystery. I'd assume a loose connection, but I wouldn't have thought you could get a loose connection just from overheating, and also RAM sticks are very much not loose.