Dell GX270 Burn-in

After describing the initial failure there, I’ve been having it boot at 6:15 am and shut down at 8:00 am; if it ever fails to shut down, I know it hasn’t started up correctly.

As you might expect, it’s booted fine every morning for the last week. I think that’s good news…

The /etc/crontab entry to make that happen is:

00 08   * * *   root    shutdown -P now

I suppose I should put a little script in /etc/cron.daily, rather than futzing with the main crontab file, but I’m lazy.

The /etc/rc.local file starts up a few odds & ends:

date >> /home/ed/startup.txt
echo -n "starting rc.local ... " >> /home/ed/startup.txt
##-- update dyndns record of our external IP address
echo -n "ddclient ... " >> /home/ed/startup.txt
if [ -x /usr/sbin/ddclient ] ; then
         ddclient -force
fi
#-- fire off Primenet Mersenne Prime search
echo -n "mprime ... " >> /home/ed/startup.txt
/opt/primenet/mprime -t &
echo -n "scanbuttond ... " >> /home/ed/startup.txt
scanbuttond
echo "done" >> /home/ed/startup.txt
exit 0

Most of that does some really crude logging to a file in my home directory. If it fails to start up, I’ll at least know when it last worked…

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve disabled ddclient (to prevent it from snatching Mom’s current IP address out from under dyndns.com) by the simple expedient of renaming the file to ddclient.off. The script actually tests whether /usr/sbin/ddclient is executable, but changing the name makes it obvious why it’s not running.

Just to keep the CPU heatsink warm, it runs GIMPS: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Admittedly, a 2.4 GHz Celeron isn’t exactly the ideal CPU for this task, but every little bit helps. Right now it’s running the torture test with all the memory it wants, but I’ll throttle that back when Mom gets it.

Don’t know what I’ll do if it fails, to tell you the truth.

Memo to self: remember to switch mprime back to normal mode with less memory.