Extended TPU server outage in the near future
I recently took the TPU server offline briefly to blast out all the dust that had accumulated in its fans, heatsinks, vents and so on. While I was in there poking around, a heatsink fell off one of the motherboard's main chipset chips. It's a fairly large, metal heatsink that was held on by two springy metal clips. I was unable to reattach it, because one of the loops on the motherboard to which the clips are supposed to attach appeared to have fallen off.
At the time, it looked to me like the heatsink had never been attached properly and had simply been held in place by a large bundle of wires nearby. Some web research revealed that this particular motherboard has a design flaw whereby the loops on the motherboard are made from a material that doesn't hold solder very well. The result is that after a lot of heating/cooling cycles, the clips tend to pop out.
Meanwhile, I left the heatsink off and fired up the server again. It doesn't seem to be having any overheating problems, but I want to reinstall that heatsink as soon as possible. Although running the Battlefield 1942 server software doesn't really put much of a strain on the server, I just don't think it's a good idea to run it like this.
I have a solution to the heatsink attachment problem, but it will involve taking the server off-line for up to an hour. This has to be done while I'm awake (for obvious reasons) but I want to avoid interfering with TPU players as much as possible. So here's a question (answer in the comments): what do you think would be the best time to take the server off-line for an hour? Make sure you include time zone in your reply. My 'awake' hours are typically 5am to 9pm PST (yes, I know, I'm weird).
At the time, it looked to me like the heatsink had never been attached properly and had simply been held in place by a large bundle of wires nearby. Some web research revealed that this particular motherboard has a design flaw whereby the loops on the motherboard are made from a material that doesn't hold solder very well. The result is that after a lot of heating/cooling cycles, the clips tend to pop out.
Meanwhile, I left the heatsink off and fired up the server again. It doesn't seem to be having any overheating problems, but I want to reinstall that heatsink as soon as possible. Although running the Battlefield 1942 server software doesn't really put much of a strain on the server, I just don't think it's a good idea to run it like this.
I have a solution to the heatsink attachment problem, but it will involve taking the server off-line for up to an hour. This has to be done while I'm awake (for obvious reasons) but I want to avoid interfering with TPU players as much as possible. So here's a question (answer in the comments): what do you think would be the best time to take the server off-line for an hour? Make sure you include time zone in your reply. My 'awake' hours are typically 5am to 9pm PST (yes, I know, I'm weird).