In the night from 2025-07-04 to 2025-07-05 UTC+1 DST, after 29 years of
near-continuous operation, XIN.at's operating system experienced an
NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt, so a hardware interrupt) parity error on
EISA bus system, slot E, causing the kernel to immediately halt the system.
Preliminary memory and PCI subsystem diagnosis has shown, that the
most likely culprit is the system's secondary PCI bus, to which the EISA
bus also connects via a PCI-2-EISA bridge chip. Further attempts to boot
the operating system have immediately caused further NMI's on the
PCI subsystem. The panic message did not specify a bus number, but
it can probably be assumed that this is due to PCI bus 2 having failed.
Further it was found that no PCI BIOSes (like VGA, SCSI or NIC/PXE
BIOSes) would POST for cards on PCI bus 2, further showing evidence
regarding this being the source of the problem.
This requires replacing the main system board, which in case of this
specific machine - my IBM PC Server 704 - ist not exactly a trivial process.
I have tested some boards from my replacement part stock already,
having found at least one that does a successful initial POST, showing
working video output.
I also found a dead mainboard as well as three dead memory riser boards
amongst my parts, but let's ignore that for now...
The next step will be to see whether the system would actually work
and more importantly boot from any of my block devices. This can be quite
troublesome, as the BIOS cannot be configured without an IBM BIOS
configuration floppy disk, unlike with regular PCs. In its initial
state many years back I couldn't even boot the machine at all without
using said disk. So we'll see how that goes.
Attempts to restore XIN.at to a working condition will be resumed
when it's a bit cooler, as the current heat and humidity are really
killing me here...
No E.T.A. yet, sorry. If you need to contact me, please use my public
[work eMail address].
Update 2025-07-07: Meanwhile, I have re-routed all email traffic by
changing the MX record on my ISP's DNS server. With this, I am reachable
via my private email account as well (as are several other users), so if you
know my private XIN.at mail address, yes, you can contact me there
as well once again.
The actual XIN.at server is still offline for now, however. :(
Update 2025-07-10: Plan is to attempt resumption of service
during the coming weekend.
Wish me luck!
-Thrawn