Last updated on August 26, 2009
Yesterday while at work Danielle informed me that she was unable to reach the internet from my house. SSHing into Trashwall showed that while it could talk to the public network, for some reason it couldn’t talk internally. I figured that a quick reboot might be worth trying, but after that it never came back. Watching the console yesterday showed it dumping core while booting, and that the system’s time had been reset to the epoch. Hopefully this is just a case of the PRAM battery having failed. It’s a SAFT LS 14250 C, which is thankfully easy to find. Out of the system the battery reads 3.6V, which is normal for it, but it’s possible it’s right on the edge.
I think that after replacing the battery and getting Open Firmware properly set back up I’ll look at replacing it’s el-cheapo 2GB Compact Flash drive with an actual hard disk. The extra space will allow me to run Cacti, which I think would be pretty nifty to use for logging per-device bandwidth use, wireless network stats, and things like that.
Currently my house is running just-fine on an AirPort Extreme which works well, but is a bit limited feature-wise. It’s really nifty that it supports IPv6 and all, but that’s not something that I currently use. If I’m not able to get Trashwall (that is, the Mac with the many-port NICs and such) going again, I’ll have to figure out something else for network connectivity at home. I really like the idea of a ultra-quiet OpenBSD box handling everything, but I’ll have to find (and silence) a PC in order to do the same thing. That might take a lot of effort.
UPDATE: Trashwall was fixed by fitting a new hard disk, replacing the PRAM battery, restoring the OpenFirmware settings, and installing OpenBSD 4.6. Everything is working great again.