The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

Apparently my DMA server blew up today sometime. I've also had two other servers go out since bringing Nostalgia BBS back on-line, and it's about to the point where I just want to give up. I always expected hardware failure here and there but not at this rate.

I've also been hoping that the servers would hold out until I had more time and money to put in to the BBS, to make things better, faster, and have hardware that would last longer.

Despite putting everything on a battery backup and surge protectors, to prolong the life of the servers and make it so that there is little to no human interaction between me and the hardware, that plan was kind of a failure.

Now, I just have to weigh in the options and see what comes next...

What happened? What kind of hardware are we talking about?

It's all pretty cheap hardware and probably could be replaced for $100-$150. Basically, the DMA server had dual cooling fans on it. Apparently one of them stopped working for whatever reason, and then the other got stopped up with dust. If I would have knew that one of the coolers went out, I could have changed the one out and clean the clogged up one out, but since I put up the BBS to stay up months at a time, with out me having to go to the office to check on them, I didn't notice the problem until it was too late.

The sql server didn't blow up but was actually just so unstable that it wouldn't stay up for long periods of time. I had to reboot it every few days, and I wasn't willing to do that. I worked on this system several times, changed out parts, cleaned it, and came to the conclusion that gateway PCs suck.

The door game server also didn't blow up, but it became unstable over time. It could just need a good cleaning inside and out, but I haven't had time to try to fix it.

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I do have a backup for the DMA server but it's probably much slower and only would be a temp solution.

BTW, I did get everything (Except the sql server) back up and running. I went to a passive cooling system on the DMA server and the door game server just needed a good contacts cleaning.