Technical Difficulties

This week's Lost recap was delayed for a night by technical difficulties. Things seem to be back to normal now, but for those few who are interested, here's what happened. First off, I have paid the price this week of the dual sins of smoking around my computer and never cleaning the damn thing out. Earlier in the week, the power supply fan burned itself out, and the machine immediately began overheating and shutting itself off. My original plan, to replace it with something brand new, a nice laptop I've been wanting for a long time now, was thwarted by lack of funding, and I was despairing of being able to make repairs. Enki, my workstation here at home, is an old Sony Vaio I inherited from Dustin a few years back when he decided to get a replacement box rather than sinking anything more into upgrades. His primary motivation was to hook me up with something that would run City of Heroes. Sony uses all kinds of proprietary parts in their systems to make you buy parts from them at hugely inflated prices. I eventually found the power supply for this model on their site for around $170. So I headed out to the local PC Club at lunch today to see what I could come up with. I even brought Enki's dead power supply with me for comparison, along with the mounting bracket used to hold it in place. Sadly, it turns out the outside of the bracket is exactly the same size as a standard power supply unit, meaning what I needed was something maybe half a centimeter smaller in each dimension. Nothing there, so I decided to wait till evening and see if there was any way to mount a standard power supply onto the case. I'd decided by the time I left work that I would find a way, even if it was all zip ties and duct tape, so I went back to PC Club. This time, the sales dude found me a smaller form factor supply, that while too small to really mount well in the bracket, should do the trick. I bought it on the spot (compare $30 to what Sony is charging) and brought it on home. After blasting everything clean with some canned air, I managed to get on screw in to hold the power supply to the bracket, plug everything in, and get running again. Enki's been up and online for several hours now with no sign of getting too hit. Last night, I managed to run him for about an hour before he powered himself off. On top of that, dingir.org dropped off of the internet yet again. No host in the domain would resolve from anywhere I could get to fro most of yesterday. Jessika clued me into the problem when she found that Middle Raged Punk wouldn't resolve for her. I could get to the server itself just fine using other hostnames, so my guess is Registerfly dropped the ball yet again on my domains. It's not the first time, and I would bet money it won't be the last, so I'm shopping around for someplace else to register all my domains that will also handle my DNS and email forwarding. Registerfly has also, by the way, managed to simply lose the email forwarding information for more than one of my domains, some more than once, and I have to submit multiple support tickets to get it fixed. They'll go in and do something, then declare the problem solved and close the ticket, and I have to go back later and open a new ticket to tell them the problem is still very much there. I'm tired of it, and Jess is as well, so we'll most likely be moving once we can find a suitable company. Any suggestions you might have would be appreciated. I've queried others and gotten a lot of information to sift through already. So there's the wonderful saga of my last week. Everything is apparently working right now (knock on wood). Technorati tags: technical difficulties, DNS, Registerfly, hardware failure, power supply