Some of you folks might have heard that it got a bit windy around these
parts yesterday...

At one point the electric glitched,  and several machines crashed,  but all
came up okay.

Last night,  a bit after 11,  all power went off,  and stayed off for maybe
2 minutes or so.  When it came back up this box was okay,  the
firewall/router was okay,  and the linux server/primary machine was giving
me grief.

What,  battery dead?  Ok,  but that should make any difference if I don't
shut it off,  right?  Wrong.  I'd go through and put all of the settings
in,  and then hit "save and exit" and I'd get the _same_ message!
 Go back into setup, and there's nothing there but the default settings.

Checked the battery,  it's a common coin cell,  CR2032,  and measures 0.5v!
Never saw one get that low...  Pulled one off another board that was laying
around here that I can't use for other reasons (keyboard connector's in a
strange place),  and checked that -- 2.8v -- but it gives me the same
result.

Ok,  time to start swapping hardware...

Power supply checks out okay,  the +5 on a drive connector is 5.00 exactly.
The +12 is at 12.6,  a bit on the high side but within tolerance.

Check another MB I have here -- stone cold dead,  no help there.  Then the
one I was using for a test fixture.  Looks good so far,  put it all
together,  and try and boot it up.  Just my luck that linux decides that
_this_ is the time it needs to check those mounted partitions (2 of them,
amounting to 6.4G) and that take a while.  (At 1 am!)  Will it boot?  Nope.

Giving me "assertion flubbed" (?!) and "segment
violation" and I see things loading that weren't supposed to be
loading according to _my_ configs.  Takes an awful long time to get to a
login prompt,  and then when it does before I can try anything I see
another segment violation,  kernel PANIC.

Re-seated the ram,  and next time I power up it sees only 32M of 64.  Tried
again,  got past that,  and it hangs right after selecting video mode at
the boot prompt,  with a couple of funny characters top left corner of the
screen.

Tried changing the video card out,  and now I'm at that "System
Configurations" box that the BIOS puts up there,  and it's hung again.
 Tried setup again, saving it again,  and it goes,  gets partway into the
boot process,  and hangs again,  right after "Freeing unused kernel
memory: 112k freed". 

I was right in the middle of writing an email at the time this happened, 
too. I guess it's gonna pile up there a bit,  too...

Yep,  Looks like I'm gonna be shopping for some hardware again today.  :-(

Or maybe not,  I feel lousy,  probaby have that bug that's been going
around,  and won't be going anywhere today...  :-(

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