Friday, November 2, 2012

Jumping faster than planned

My hand may be forced sooner than I'd wanted. The Mac Pro has started getting flaky on me. Twice in the past couple of days, it's locked up with a completely white screen. It's had a problem for a while with seeing all 12 GB of memory in it; most, but not all, of the time, it's only seen two 1 GB DIMMs where there are 2 GB DIMMs.

I'm suspecting that something in one of the memory riser boards is failing. There are two of them in the machine, with two 2 GB DIMMs and two 1 GB DIMMs each. I may try replacing one, just to see if that cures the problem, but first, I'll pull it apart and blow the dust out of it. Sometimes the little steps are the best.

If it stays flaky, though, I'm going to have to make a decision, fast: do I try to replace it now, or do I take the plunge? I'm not ready to go Linux whole hog yet. There are too many things I depend on OS X to do right now, from generating Microsoft Office documents to using Citrix Remote Access software to using Microsoft Remote Desktop over Cisco VPNs to doing GoToMeeting meetings, all for talking to customers and keeping the bills paid. If I drop OS X, I need to have an alternative, and that alternative had better not be "run Windows!". If I wanted to run Windows, I'd be doing it already. I can run Windows 7 in a VM, but if I spend all my time in the VM, then I might as well run Windows for real and do away with the middleman.

And no, not doing any of the things I listed in the last paragraph is not an option. I'm not in a position to tell customers that I'm not going to work with what they demand of me.

Replacing the entire box will cost me a kilobuck, but in the process I'll get an upgrade by one generation to one that can run Mountain Lion natively. That's a kilobuck I just don't have at the moment, however.

So, how do I keep serving my customers in a Linux environment?

5 comments:

  1. > There are too many things I depend on OS X to do right now, from generating Microsoft Office documents to using Citrix Remote Access software to using Microsoft Remote Desktop over Cisco VPNs to doing GoToMeeting meetings, all for talking to customers and keeping the bills paid.

    Jay,

    I'm running Linux (CentOS 6) on a Dell laptop (trusty old Latitude D820) with reasonable success in inter-operating with an almost exclusively Windows environment at work. We've got a Cisco VPN, and there's a native Linux client for it. I use LibreOffice to manipulate M$ Office docs, with no issues. (Admittedly, the things I create/modify are pretty basic word processing and spreadsheet, with some PowerPoints that I have to view but not change.) You should have a Remote Desktop client (look for "tsclient" at the command line) which will talk just fine to XP and Win7 boxen.

    You're absolutely right - there are many things that should Just Work that don't, for reasons inscrutable and distressing. Yesterday I was trying to use Firefox (10.0.10) to upload some photos to Facebook (don't ask, and don't hate me!) - it said it worked, but nothing appeared. Had to get a WinXP user to do it for me. :-P And as I was trying to post this, that same browser would not let me upload a profile picture to Blogger. (I'm the same "John D. Bell" as on "Armed and Dangerous.")

    If your Mac holds out, why not try a "side-by-side" test - e.g., hack on some documents with LibreOffice, then carry them back to the Mac and see if they're OK for what you need.

    > Replacing the entire box will cost me a kilobuck,

    Could you just replace the memory riser cards and/or the DIMMs instead? Would that save any money? And would it give you enough warm fuzzies about the reliability?

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  2. I can get a new riser card for $95, and will definitely try that first. I'm pretty sure the DIMMs are good.

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  3. Jay - Did your replacement riser card arrive? And did it (seem to) solve the problems?

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  4. Got the replacement riser card. It didn't change a thing, so I did the DIMM swap dance, isolated one bad DIMM, and then got all 4 in that order replaced under Other World Computing's lifetime warranty. (Their choice, not mine; I'd have been happy to just replace the one, but their logic was that they'd just as soon not have to have another replacement order in another little while.)

    I'm now seeing all 12 GB again, but it still didn't fix the problem. I'm beginning to suspect the graphics card; the next time it crashes, before hauling off and rebooting, I'm going to try sshing and then VNCing into the system to see if it's actually still up.

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  5. Jay - So *was* it your graphics card? If so, is there a fix short of replacing the entire box? Just bein' nosy.... - JDB

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