[plug] hot freeze - not a contradiction in terms

[Ian Kent]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 22:44 +0900, Gavin Chester wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 21:48 +0900, Ian Kent wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 20:34 +0900, Gavin Chester wrote:
> > > With this hot spell I have seen my workstation emulating a windoze PC in
> > > the sense that twice today without warning it has lost all keyboard
> > > input and apparent disc I/O so that I could not even open a VT or do
> > > anything except a full reboot.  
> > > 
> > > I suspect the heat is causing disc problems and perhaps my box is not
> > > ventilated well enough, but I can't find anything in /var/log/messages
> > > at the time the latest lock-up happened.  (Aside: you may recall that I
> > > reported problems with these discs before in that the filesystem has
> > > become read-only without warning)
> > > 
> > > Just what might I be seeing here, do you think?  Where might I look to
> > > get a better understanding?
> > 
> > Or it could be capacitor(s) starting to dye.
> > You'll know about that because after a while (hours, days or months) the
> > machine will become unusable and eventually will fail the POST and won't
> > boot at all. I've found the most common time for this to happen is
> > summer time, probably because of the increased operating temperature.
> > 
> > Faulty caps are easily spotted (a bulging or a browny colour on the top
> > of the cap can) and apparently easy enough to replace but I have yet to
> > repair a motherboard myself.
> 
> Ewwwhh!  Hopefully that's an absolute worst, worst case scenario that
> rarely happens :-(

You'd hope so but I have two failed motherboards right now.
One failed two days ago and both look a bit like cap failure.

Ian