Last week my proxy server, a Sun Ultra 2 running NetBSD 3.0_STABLE, started powering itself off. Every time I powered the machine on again, after about an hour (just after resynchronising the RAID), it would power off again. There were no messages on the serial console, which was rather puzzling.

Some judicious Googling suggested that it could be a heat problem, so on the weekend I stripped the machine down and cleaned it out. It was full of dust – a thick layer on the power supply and over the CPUs’ heat sinks. After the cleanout, the machine has been rock solid – I’ve rebuilt a lot of pkgsrc packages and put it under a fair load and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

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