kadatheron: August 16, 1997 - October 6, 2013

I've already covered the main history of kadatheron in a previous post four years ago, so to start with, I wanted to go through the case design and components.  

From the top, you can see the laptop hard drive that's been storing the cvs archive along with something like a gigabyte of swap space.  It's sitting in the place where the main optical disk drive should be, as the front case has a slot for the disk tray to open, as well as a button pass through.  This bay is blocked off by a disk caddy thing that's been reversed.  The laptop drive is sitting loose, but that hasn't been much of a problem.  The brass rails are there to hold a previous disk drive that failed.  Below this caddy is the current optical drive, which was necessary to do the system reinstall after I moved.

Spinning around to the back side shows the motherboard tray.  I kind of liked this aspect of the design, although it had certain problems (listed below).  The idea being that after removing the screw on top (already done in this picture) and the screw on the chassis back (still there), you can slide the motherboard, while it's still attached to the tray and therefore grounded, towards the front to clear the back panel, and then swing it out to service it.

However, this next picture shows the failure of that plan:  the expansion cards are not attached to a similar tray, but rather to the rear of the case.  Therefore, if you want to operate on the motherboard, you need to remove all of the expansion cards.  Not the best strategy.

This view also shows the original 2GB main hard drive.  I really thought that this would be the first component to fail.  I suspect that with the laptop hard drive doing most of the read/writes, the load on it dropped to a point where it was able to work without trouble.  Below the hard drive is the floppy disk drive, the last one that I have that still worked.  Next is the giant block of the power supply, with a curious beige angle to be discussed at the end.

Next are the expansion cards:

The original ISA ethernet card.  Rereading the previous blog post reminds me that this is dead.

Ethernet router necessitated PCI ethernet card.

ISA modem.

Here's a picture of the motherboard after removal.  Empty expansion slots on the bottom, the Pentium 200MHZ under the chunky aluminum heat sink on the right, the 32MB RAM card just under the 16MB hardwired RAM on the surface.  I suspect that the two dark brown slots on the top left are where the expandable video memory would have gone.  The board claims "256k * 16/40ns", which google seems to translate into "Yes, this is a type of RAM slot."  

And now we get to the part that finally was the downfall of kadatheron.  You'll notice that there is no fan on the processor heat sink.  That beige angle shown above is also visible in the next image, where you can see that it lines up nicely with the location of the processor when the motherboard is inserted.

In order to save money/space/cooling?, Compaq decided that the input fan for the power supply (a Mitac 304231-001) should suck the hot air off the processor, feed that air over the power supply components, and then exhaust it out the back of the case.  Alternatively (if I have the fan direction wrong), it sucks outside air into the power supply, over the power supply components, and then onto the processor to push the heat away.

Rear exhaust port on the power supply.

Last night, I heard a noise, and initially thought that my neighbor was running his garbage disposal.  When it didn't stop for ten minutes, I got up and investigated.  Kadatheron had started making a loud grating sound, and after opening the case and touching all the things with moving parts, I was able to track the sound down to the power supply fan.  Not a good thing.

I immediately rsynced the important things off the disks (CVS archive, /etc, /var, /home), and started looking around online.  Amazon has a refurbished unit for $100.  Ebay has units of questionable quality for $30.  This was the point where it didn't make sense to attempt to fix it.  After being up and running almost constantly for sixteen years, I decided that the best thing to do would be to shut kadatheron down for the final time.

I've also ordered a replacement.  I wanted something small and lightweight, since I really just need something that can serve the CVS data, and maybe some other minor data access stuff.  To that end, I decided to get a tiny Raspberry Pi kit for the replacement.  Definitely not a super powered device, but it's still significantly stronger than kadatheron, and should allow everything to be fanless and have data based on sd cards.  No moving parts means it's much harder to die.  Now I just need to come up with a hostname for it.