Novell surprise this morning

[hutch--]

Woke up, went to turn on my normal computer and the light came on but was followed a few seconds later by a loud pop and power went off.

Went and had my morning coffee then came back home ready to do the diagnistics on the box. Disconnected sound and network, took the side cover off, blew out some of the dust and could not find anything wrong and with the sound disconnected, no pop, just stopped.

Then the penny dropped, the switch had got some dust in it and was not pushing back out when released. Sprayed it with WD40, cleaned out any junk around the edges with an Exacto knife and bingo, it works correctly again.

I had just finished doing the diagnostics on the 18 core Xeon and did not really want to have to do it all again with my old i7. The two boxes are identical apart from the CPU, the i7 is a bit faster on low core counts and this is why I use it as my DEV box while the Xeon while being slightly slower on single or low core counts is more than twice as fast.

I will go around for another coffee now that the problem is solved. 

[Shintaro]

For a moment I thought Novell had started something in the networking market. I used to really like Novell, the original core written in assembly from what I heard, by John Major, I think.

Anyway WD40? I thought it might be too heavy and abrasive for computer plastics. I think there is a WD40 for electrical. Everyone seems to use DeOxIT. But that is too expensive for me.
I just use standard contact cleaner.
Digressing, I always thought that THIS spray product represented what most people thought when working on old machinery.

But the "pop" is always an oh Sh&% moment.
Why do you need so much CPU? What are you doing, if you don't mind me asking, that uses that much CPU?
I would guess that, if you have that much CPU cores, you would have 128Gb RAM?

[hutch--]

WD40 worked fine. The box tended to get a layer of dust on it as it rarely ever gets moved and the dust settled into the narrow space around the switch button. The POP was through the sound system, unplugged the sound cable and no pop. Blew out the dust inside the can then cleaned out the switch and off it went.

The other box with the 18 core Xeon which is identical apart from the CPU is for a specialised task, if I make a video of 2 or 3 gig video which is easy enough to do in 4k, I have to run it through "ffmpeg" and while my old i7 is fast enough with 6 cored clocked at 4 gig, the Xeon with its high core count will run at slightly over double the frame rate which drops the processing time by more than half.

Its single core speed is OK, about 3.8 gig and it is a pleasant enough box to use. Thrash the guts out of it and it runs at about 50c which is easily safe enough.

Some of the high end Intel CPUs are a fair bit faster but they run at rediculous temperatures, > 90c where this thing struggles to beat 50c. It means I don't have to fund and build a new box any time soon.