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21 Jul 2000 Dallas Semiconductor are shipping me a new dongle (DS9097U) to drive the instrumentation bus. The general consensus was that the ESD protection did it's job, and absorbed the energy. However, it fails open, so there is now no access the the bus. The replacement will be protected behind a regular telephone line surge suppressor. Who knows if it will help?

19 Jul 2000 I realise that the reason that Linux will not boot is due to the CMOS setting of the graphics card shared aperture now being 8MB rather than the old 2MB. For some reason Linux doesn't detect the amount of memory on the motherboard (over 64MB) and so I had to hardwire it. The ethernet card still works (hooray). It appears that the video capture card is dead -- or maybe the camera is fried. It turns out that the video cable is not connected to the capture card -- I disconnected it when I was trying to figure out what was broken. Reconnecting the cable fixes that. The temperature and rain gauge sensors are not operational -- the instrumentation bus does not detect the presence of any devices. Having said that, it also doesn't detect the presence of a shorted out bus, so I suspect that the interface dongle may be fried. I now have surge suppressors for the video wiring and the instrumentation bus wiring.

18 Jul 2000 A big storm rolls through, and though the promised hail does not appear, there is a nearby lightning strike, and the pond server gets into a funny state. It reports that the CMOS battery is low (which is unlikely). I reset the CMOS, and it no longer will boot Linux. The system is attached to a UPS so I am hopeful that it isn't really fried.

Topic:  All Internet Radio Phone Pond Weather

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