Okay, last PSU “repair”, I promise (well, until I get another). The bottom of my pile had a Corsair CX600 on it that had shorted out, and nearly fused it’s CPU 12V connection to the motherboard it was attached to. I managed to get it off, but testing the power supply resulted in no output except the +5VSB line. I contacted Corsair, and they quickly set up an RMA for me. I provided them with pictures of the connector, cable, serial number, and picture of my Dr. Power II screen showing no output. I shipped the unit USPS on Saturday, it got there on Monday, they shipped out a replacement that same day, and I had the brand new unit in hand on Wednesday. This was obviously all West coast, but still. I’m pretty amazed by their turn around. Hats off to Corsair.
Archives for February 2015
Antec NeoPower 550
Power supply repair number two, for me, is repairing a unit I’ve had for years, and “works”, but frequently, it will power up the the computer, then almost immediately power it back off, and require flipping the switch on the power supply off and on to get it back “working”. This behavior is indicative of either the Over or Under Voltage/Current latch kicking in (this could be semi-confirmed by unplugging fans, or hard drives from the power supply, and it would start up much more reliably). If the unit did successfully power up, it would run the computer with no problems for weeks/months at a time (I had the unit powering an IPTV box for 6 months previous to teardown for repair). Testing with my Dr. Power II shows everything is fine, but the tester only puts a couple ohms of load on the unit. Real testing requires an actual PC load (or a much larger load than I can provide with my Reload:Pro). Opening the unit, I found that several of the solder joints between the output wiring, and the “jacks” for attaching cables looked “cold” or “dry” (meaning, non-good solder connections) (See picture here). This can certainly lead to protection kicking in on devices. Reflowing these connections took a bit of time due to the thermal mass of the wiring and connection board, but after, the connections did look much better. Testing again showed everything was fine (as before). Hooking the unit back up to a real PC showed consistent power up. Calling this one fixed, for now.
Partkeepr and PHP 5.6
Because I couldn’t find any info on this myself (and therefore my Partkeepr install has been broken since updating to PHP 5.6), and it took the developer of Partkeepr some thought on how to Google for it himself, I thought I would post something quick on Partkeepr and PHP 5.6. Basically, it works, but only if you don’t have a couple options set with PHP 5.6’s Zend OPCache (the built-in OPCache in 5.6, which largely deprecated APC). There are two options for opcache that completely break several frameworks, such as Doctrine, which Partkeepr uses extensively. The options are:
opcache.save_comments
opcache.load_comments
If either of these options is set to “0”, things break. And of course, if you read the notes on “opcache.save_comments” it mentioned breaking Doctrine. So, make sure they’re set to “1” if you’re using any of those frameworks, and especially if you’re using Partkeepr. I banged my head against this for days.
The developer of Partkeepr, however, is going to have a runtime check in a new version that makes sure those two options are set properly, otherwise have Partkeepr throw an error. Here’s the initial bug report of mine. Hopefully this post will help someone, and save them some hair being torn out. =)
UPDATE: I was able to just enable opcache.save_comments and load_comments for just my partkeepr domain by setting:
php_admin_flag opcache.save_comments 1
php_admin_flag opcache.load_comments 1
In the VHOST configuration for apache. This lets me leave them both as 0 for all my other sites, thereby gaining the reduced cached sizes. =) Good luck!