For the second time in less than a week one of my servers has decided to turn itself off.

It's an old server; an old PC turned into a server, is more accurate. It's been in constant service for going on three years. Not bad for a hand-me-down Celeron pressed into service as a busy mail server and previously a web server, too.

I'm sure it's the power supply starting to fail. I hit it today with a good burst of compressed air to try to get some of the dust and dirt from the fan, but there's more likely a replacement to be done.

I'd like to replace the whole machine. Due to some parts swappings during a recent flurry of upgrades between myself and a pal, I find myself left with a fair AMD mobo. I need a CPU, some RAM, and a new HDD. Well, probably a case and decent power supply, too. OK, so I'm $50 closer to a new server...but that's something. And the mobo only supports processors that start much, much, much faster than the existing server. If only I can get Solaris to boot on the thing; when I tried previously the install would hard reboot and the system wouldn't recognize that the installation had been interrupted.

In the meantime I'll probably move the e-mail services to this server (the one hosting this site). There already is an e-mail server running on this server, but it's not configured for the same users and domains, or the e-mail list software. I think I can seemingly seamlessly make the conversion, a little at a time; there's not much non-SPAM activity on the box any more.