Long Nights in a New Friend

So, I spent the better part of the day and night messing with the server. I had forgotten about a problem that I had noticed about a month ago when I was assembling most of the parts to begin with. It wasn't until about three failed attempts of installing the latest build of Ubuntu that I remembered it. You see the case that I currently have for the server is arranged in such a way that the cpu is kind of close to the power supply. Granted, that this might not normally be a problem (although still a bad design in my opinion) but in my case, the fan that I have over the cpu is pretty massive. It's about 2 1/4 inches resting on top of a 4 inch heat reduction coil. Now, this is good for cooling purposes, but bad when there is only about a 1/4 inch gap between the fan and the power supply. In my haste to get things going I suppose I put it off in my mind.

Needless to say, this caused the psu to overheat. Now for some reason, I was thinking, "what is going on, is the damn thing overheating," but I couldn't remember why. It wasn't until I opened up the case to make sure the cpu fan was working that it dawned on me that I had forgot about the problem. So, I had to do some temporary adjustments and the psu is now resting on the bottom of the case for time being, with the case open. This took care of the problem for the time being, and the system is no longer freezing up. It's kind of funny though, I don't normally get that excited about things, and here I was just blowing off a problem with the system. Well, I thought it was funny anyways.

So, I'm either going to have to do some custom cutting to the case to get something worked out, or I'm going to have to get a new case. I have some tin snips, so I think I'm going to try some custom work to the case first, but if that doesn't work out, I found a decent case on-line for under $50. It'll have to wait a few months though as there are more pressing purchases to make in way of summer clothes for the kid, car insurance payments, and a portable air conditioner for where the computers are so that they don't over heat this summer.

My thoughts on Ubuntu Linux so far, after spending about five hours messing around and setting it up are, I like the interfaces a lot, I haven't really gotten to do a whole lot as I spent time downloading updates and just getting familiar with basic file structures and the like. I also downloaded Boinc to run Seti so that I could free up my dev box from it, so hopefully it'll have a little longer life. One thing I'm not liking though is the inability to access things as a root user without having to do some sort of working around. I suppose it keeps inexperienced people from screwing things up, but it seems like over kill in the area of protection. I would assume that anyone who can manage to work around the system the way that it is setup to emulate a root user, they could still screw things up just as bad, even unintentionally, but I guess it would take a little bit more work. At any rate, it's going to be an ongoing learning process. I just have to make sure it doesn't get in the way of working on the engine as well. Long day tomorrow.. err.. today. I better get some sleep.