Update: The KVM just died. So this room is effectively dead until I replace it. Stupid piece of shit was $450 in 2016. Someone snuck a sacred burial ground under this room while I wasn't looking.
It's been something. I realized over dinner that the only devices not in open rebellion are the ones I have already had open and replaced board-level components on. Unless you count the Mac Mini, whose hard drive was replaced with an external Thunderbolt three years ago.
I decided to dig into the dead PC because fuck it's sitting here like a lump of shit in its spendy-ass custom case. Discovered that it'll wake up enough to tell me that the CPU heat alarm is triggered... sometimes. Okay, if it's doing that having sat not moving for a while we'll assume it's the mobo. Especially since I did a power supply test and according to Corsair, the power supply is f'n fine. Also discovered that Anandtech's prices are per thousand so I don't feel so bad paying $600 for a CPU that supposedly only costs $450. Also discovered that yeah AMDs are cheaper but only if you're buying bullshit guttertrash chips; up here in the rarified air where our computers work for a living the price difference is pennies. Also discovered that in 2015 I paid for 128GB of RAM... to put on a motherboard that will only address 64GB. So on the one hand woot woot I'm about to double my ram for free but on the other hand sweet jesus fuck if you pay for expertise (dipshits actually build PCs for Pro Tools for a living!) you expect to receive it. Changing out the CPU and motherboard because the options for the socket I've got don't lend themselves to doing this shit one at a time. A thousand dollars later let's see if we can remedy some shit. Also that KVM was fuckin' $450 in 2016. It was $450 in 2011. It's $450 in 2020 but it's been nine goddamn years so you can buy 'em 2 for $70 off eBay 'cuz bloody hell I be wantin' a spare now.
My daughter woke me up this morning because the internet was out. Our network was offline. Suspecting that the UPS in the gear closet had powered down (it had done this once before, I thought it was a fluke), I powered it up again. Yep. Took the whole network down rather than going into battery backup. Checked on the NAS. NAS was mad because it hadn't been shut down properly. Also wanted more storage space. It's got bloody 28TB but apparently when you get within 20% of it it starts giving you warnings. So I told it to empty its recycle bins. UPS killed everything again. "Okay, time for a new UPS," I say to myself and power stuff back up, this time with the intent of powering down the NAS and leaving it down until the UPS shows up. NAS COMES UP AS A CRASHED DISK ARRAY. Yeah apparently it doesn't matter if you've got two drives of redundancy; if that file server is moving files around when the power goes out? It'll just garbage the whole thing. Spent a couple hours replacing the UPS with a power strip and checking my options (Synology says "data recovery services") and then recalling what on the nAS wasn't straight-up backup. 90% of it is but I'd gotten complacent and was using parts of it as a file server because in 5 years it's never given me a problem. Decide "fukkit if it's dead it's dead" and power it back up. This time it comes up without a complaint, mounts the file system and acts all happy. So I am copying everything that isn't backup onto an external hard drive (I'm the kind of guy who has about 15TB worth of empty disks) so that as soon as I'm done I can power the dumb thing down and say "boy I sure learned my lesson!" Change your batteries, kids. And fuck Cyberpower.