Communication Lives: Joey is Back
Not that I couldn’t check or read my e-mail over the past week, but it wasn’t exactly easy to reply and file and stuff. That is all over now, as joey.home.local lives again. The CPU fan (while looking like the cheapest piece of OEM junk ever made) hums quietly (couldn’t be more than 20 dB… the previous fan in pre-failure mode had to have been 35-40 dB). The noise factor is huge in a bedroom.
I had a temporary scare, and it will take a moment to explain it. There is a piece of die-cut metal that comes with almost all motherboards. I tend to call this a “port plate” or a “back plate.” This is because it is a plate that covers up the gaps between all the various ports (keyboard, mouse, USB, serial, parallel, audio, etc.) on the back of a computer. It’s made of aluminum so it can flex and snap into place.
Anyway, the port plate that came with the new board did not have a LAN port punched out, and so I snapped it on to discover that I did not have an ethernet port. Shoot, said I, as a server is pretty darn useless without ethernet connectivity.
I installed a card in the (poor excuse for a) PCI slot on the board, only to find it was not Linux-compatible (at least immediately).
I issued an lspci, which for the uninitiated means “tell me what is plugged in to the PCI bus on my computer.” I saw a VIA-brand ethernet card.
Yes, kids, that’s right. I punched out the LAN port spot on the port plate to find an ethernet port right there.
Me buildz computters ‘n’ stuff. Me smart.