Better To Be Lucky Than Good?

During the recent move of Bloglines from Equinex in San Jose to AT&T, we retired a couple of machines and added several new machines. Yesterday, we were reconfiguring what used to be one of the primary database machines at the old co-lo. While swapping out drives, I noticed that the wire for the speaker was completely melted. Looking more closely, the speaker had shorted against the metal chassis. That couldn’t have been good for things. And now, for whatever reason, that machine is completely flakey and crashes every hour or so. While it was functioning as one of the database machines at the old co-lo, it crashed a grand total of once in about 1 year of heavy operation. This was one of the machines I originally bought used off eBay. I got it cheap and it worked really well for a year, so no complaints. Ebay is still a good source for cheap gear, although it seems like there’s less good stuff (computer wise) these days than say a year ago.