I haven't sunk much money into new computing equipment in a while, instead picking up other peoples cast-offs. The downside of this tactic is that most of the stuff laying around the house is really old. The Mac was new in 2002. The stinkpad (still deceased at the moment) was new in 2004-5. I shortly after moving here, I concluded that system/data failure was eminent, and so enacted something of a backup plan.
It's ugly:
My brother had gifted me with a Pentium M (Dothan? Banias?) laptop with some screen and CD drive issues that made it unusable for normal work. However, it's USB and network ports worked, and it only pulls 5-10 Watts when doing nothing. Perfect for a home server. I connected what spare USB drives I had, and wrote an /etc/rc.shutdown.local script on the mac and logout script stinkpad to rsync all critical files on shutdown.
Things were pretty slick for a while.
About 139 days, to be exact.
Then I decided I wanted to completely backup everything in the house. The girlys laptop. All 70 gigs of photos on the mac. Other stuff. The system was working so well I wanted more.
Big mistake.
The first issue was that the drive had actually filled and rsync was failing to add new files. Since this was happening on shutdown and my silly script logs nothing, this was lost on me. wups.
(Que my brother "Program defensively!")
(Que me: "Defend against myself? Internal conflict! I need therapy!")
That masked the second issue that the laptop's temperature management circuitry was on the fritz, since the laptops CPU was never loaded, it never crashed.
Adding an additional drive and then attempting to transmit 70 gigs of data fixed that problem. The cpu temperature would climb past 70°C, then the machine would crash.
Lovely.
I reset the BIOS, and now the fan seems to modulate with CPU load again... I wonder if it will start working...
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