Ouch! - robert, 02/11/2005, 10:59
I read an article about audio out the serial port. I decided I HAD to give it a go. It was working great. I was playing "Usage of the word fuck" out of it to some headphones and although it contained a lot of noise, it was surprisingly good and wasn't tinny like I had expected. All of a sudden, however, it stopped working. I just could not get it to work again. I tried to connect to a modem using cu and minicom, both froze... While bashing ^D, all of a sudden... *BEEP* bye bye 78 days uptime on my FreeBSD box along with a handful of irritated users (including myself), who were using it at the time for IRC being booted off. Shit. The box is back up fine but the serial controller is now dead along with my tape drive! The floppy controller and serial controller seem to be linked in some way. Regardless there was a horrible smell coming from the box and I was having trouble locating it. I eventually noticed the LED on the tape drive (a Trakker 250 attached to floppy rather than parallel caddy) was on - I then noticed a whisp of smoke! I yanked the drive out and in the process touched the motor which was hot enough to cook on and now have a burn on the end of my finger which was painful for quite some time. I chucked water over the dead drive and it boiled the ...powered by coranto