Over 9000 problems

This weekend has been pretty frustrating – whilst I happily had the time to deploy IPv6 addressing to my flat network, I’ve been also having a huge amount of technology fail.

1. My server is experiencing random hardware crashes – at this stage I don’t know of a trigger, although possibly heat related – essentially the server just freezes, no messages, no console kernel panics, nothing. This is a huge frustration since I then need someone to power restart it for me and to wait for all 20VMs to resume… for now I’ve upgraded the BIOS to the latest release and am keeping an eye on temperature.
2. My 802.11n wifi access point (EnGeniusESR9850) has suddenly started having issues where it will drop traffic at random times to particular internet sites. I wish I was making this up, but it’s actually choosing to drop just *some* websites and not others and it’s driving me crazy. I’m unsure as of yet to whether it’s specific to just my laptop or not.
3. My brother’s motherboard appears to have died and the computer will no longer boot at all.
4. Whenever my ipt_NETFLOW module loads at boot on my server, the options in /etc/modprobe.d/ get ignored…. but they work fine when I re-load the module with modprobe.
5. My laptop has developed a sudden habbit of crashing after suspend/resume, despite no kernel changes or other hardware changes. I suspect the Lenovo BIOS is cursed.

I nornally don’t mind IT problems – hell, it’s what I get paid sacks of gold to do for customers, and I like the challenge to solve what would cause most people to toss it across the room and go to the nearest pub.

But when you get home after lots of busy projects, the last thing you want is some dodgy weird hardware glitches that you can’t reproduce, fix or isolate – that just drives one crazy and wastes vasts amount of limited time :-(

At least bring me the problems one-at-a-time or something so I can address them!