Reunions are so sweet. Today I turned 47. For my birthday, my wife got me a new Western Digital, Caviar Black 1 TB SATA hard drive. I opened the box and went into a dream state. All the new space to fill just makes me smile and sigh. After a few minutes of that daze, I snapped out of it and got to work. I powered down my server, disconnected everything, and opened the case. That was it. Apparently, the motherboard decided it was time to join the afterlife.
I huddled with one of my friends who happens to be pretty damn good with server hardware. He and I poked at it for a few hours, scratching our heads (our own, not each others, thank you), and saying things like "hmmmm" and "Hmmmmmm" a lot. I swapped power supplies, video cards, RAM chips, cooling fans, cables and hard drives. Nothing. Just a benign blinking power light and nothing behind the wheel. The patient was dead. So plan "C" was to swap out the motherboard. Bingo! That worked.
Nice thing was that the server is running 2008 R2 and while it took a bit longer to wake up with the new hardware, it recalibrated and awoke with a smile. I'm good. It's funny how a domain behaves when your only domain controller is offline for several days. Yes, I know that violates my "best practice" advice (and Microsoft's) to have more than one domain controller, but budgets are tight, so I have to work with what I have. The important thing is that it's back and I'm back and things are much better now. Cheers!
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