Sometimes you get a weird one…

Yesterday our voice mail server crashed. I immediately thought it was the same thing that happened exactly one year ago TO THE DAY, which I wrote about earlier this year. So, like last time I pulled the Cisco Unity Express (CUE) module out of the Cisco router with the intention of pulling the drive and running SpinRite on it, but as I turned the module over a small “part” fell out…

Hmmm… parts falling out of electronics is rarely a good thing. Neither I nor Mike (my IT Support colleague) had any idea what it was, and couldn’t find an obvious place it had broken away from on the motherboard. So Mike proceeded to SpinRite the drive as we assumed it was the culprit, just like last time.

While the drive was being tested I opened our spare CUE module for a comparison, and AHA!, there it was… the part that had fallen off was a small metal “U” that had been soldered to the motherboard, serving as an anchor for the clamp that holds the CPU heatsink down. That spring mechanism is under tension, and apparently the solder joints had given out and the “anchor” came free.

So, the drive test finishes and of course finds nothing wrong. We put it all back together, pop the module back into the router (sans heatsink anchor) and fired it up… voila! It came up and worked perfectly. Our best guess as to what happened is this: The heatsink anchor popped off the motherboard, shorting some random traces, crashing the server. Once removed, the system was able to operate fine.

Sometimes you do get a weird one