From 2 to 5

One thing about being an m68k porter is that you get to play with hardware a lot. And I mean a lot. Ska, jazz, newwave, and barok had all died during the last few weeks to months; so I was back to two working m68k machines that I could somewhat work with (quickstep, a 25Mhz 040 that I own, and arrakis, a 50Mhz (or so) 060 owned by Ingo Juergensmann). Which was not enough. To make matters worse, arrakis had actually died last week, but that was fixed quickly enough (thanks, Ingo).

Which had left me with non-working jazz, barok, ska, and newwave.

It isn't the first time that newwave dies on me, and it isn't the first time that a simple power-on again fixes it, after a few weeks of downtime. I can only conclude that this isn't a box which likes being powered on all the time, and that I'll have to leave it powered off for a few weeks every now and then. That's not a big issue, since the machine isn't very high on RAM anyway, so not very useful (apart from testing EMILE on, and other similar things).

Barok had died a few weeks ago with a kernel oops that it couldn't even print out entirely. If that sounds like hardware failure, that's because it is hardware failure. Luckily, it's nothing too bad; removing the expansion cards one by one and replacing them afterwards revealed that it's the cache RAM which is the culprit. That's good news and bad news at the same time; good, because a Macintosh IIci can work without this cache RAM (it was sold without those things after all; the cache expansion was an option); bad, because it already is the slowest machine I have, and losing the cache doesn't make it speed up. But at least that one works again—if any of you have some IIci cache lying around that you don't need anymore, feel free to send it my way.

Jazz had only paniced, like it does every time. It's a Quadra 950, and those have never been very well supported by Debian. I just needed to reboot it, which I forgot about every time I got near it. It's working again now, compiling away at the next EMILE version, which will fix a few bugs and should make it into etch. Or, well, at least it would be, if not for the b0rken debian/rules file, which I will now have to fix, I guess. Not that this isn't anything I can't handle.

Leaves Ska, which needs a new hard disk. That's not a big problem, I just need to get around to flinching me one out of the old unused RAID array at the office, low-levelling it, and placing it in ska. Which I have been planning to do for only, eh, three months or so. Whoops.