Journal Entries By Tag: #devops

Assorted journal entries with the tag #devops.

Case In Point

TL;DR — A short post about the recent site outage and the new fan I acquired for the server.

👓 2 minutes

Last Sunday evening, quite out of the blue, the web server that hosts this site started making a horrible whining noise. A quick finger-check determined it was the fan making the noise. I tried to clean the unit (and the Pi4 beneath it) with some compressed air, but alas, the damage to the fan had been done.

My Pi4 webserver, heimdallr, in its original glory.
Top view of heimdallr, so you can see both the pins and the fan that would fail.
A slightly-blurry bottom view of heimdallr, from back when it had 4 screws AND 4 little rubber feet.

Thanks to the magical delivery gnomes, a replacement case arrived the very next day (well, technically it was the following night, which was unfortunately about 2 hours too late for Monday Night’s session of Planar Vagabond, but close enough). So, Tuesday morning, I started swapping the old case for the new one, and 15 minutes later, it was back online.

After some looking around, I went with a “ICE Tower Cooler” by GeeekPi. It was relatively inexpensive, easy enough to put together, and the LED in the fan adds a distinctive, #cyberpunk vibe to the machine (particularly compared to the somewhat professional-but-pedestrian original case).

The updated heimdallr, showing off its new LED powers.
Another view of the updated heimdallr and its color-changing fan.
Rear-view of the updated heimdallr, proving it looks just as cool from the back.
Video of the updated heimdallr booting up.

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