Ska works again

A while ago, I received a Motorola VME chassis with some hardware, as a donation to the Debian project. The hardware included two MVME167 boards, an AUI, a SCSI CD-ROM disk, and some more stuff. I had used it to test and fix debian-installer on the box, and had planned to do more with it.

Unfortunately, the chassis has one weak spot: one must not leave its power cord plugged in while it's powered off. It can run 24/7 –it is designed to do that– but if you forget to unplug the power while it's switched off, it will eventually not survive that.

I forgot that once while going to work. Surely you can guess what happened. Now since I had the box for only half a year or so at that time, I felt a little embarrassed, and didn't immediately contact the guy who had donated it to me. Instead, I contacted my cousin, Koen, who's an engineer in electronics, asking him to have a look at it. Which he did. Unfortunately, he was unable to fix it without a layout schema, which I didn't have.

So, about a week ago, when Stephen Marenka talked about debian-installer support on the debian-68k mailinglist, I mentioned that its power supply was broken, and that I also couldn't find the original donator's contact address anymore.

Before I could think about it, I received a mail from one of the m68k kernel hackers who had received a box from the very same guy, and who gave me his name –Gerard Klaver– and email address; and before I could send Gerard a mail with a detailed explanation of what happened and ask him whether he had any idea on how I could fix the power module, Gerard mailed me, stating that he still had a power module which he could give me, and sent it via snail mail. I put it in the box, and it works again.

Now all that's left is for me to remember where I put the serial cable, the DB9-DB25 converter bit, and one of those AUI thingies. But I'm sure I'll manage.

Oh, and to send Gerard money (for the package) and thanks, of course. Must not forget that.