The test server that I use for doing all of my development work on was long overdue an upgrade, especially in the hard drive department. I bought a Hitachi 320GB hard drive to replace the ancient 8GB drive in the machine, along with some extra RAM. I decided that as I was installing a new hard drive, this was a perfect time to install a new operating system. As a long-term Redhat user, I decided to use Fedora 6 which is what I use in my day job as my primary OS so I like it plenty..

During the installation of Fedora 6 the computer kept on hanging at a particular point, so I initially thought it might have been a problem with the DVD. I burnt another copy from the ISO image, and tried again. Same result computer hanging and requiring a hard reboot. Hmmm, maybe that blast of hot air when I opened the case was a clue...

After rebooting into the BIOS and checking the hardware monitor, the processor (a respectable AMD Athlon XP 2700+, well capable of running Linux @2.1Ghz) was running at roughly 90°C (194°F), which is very unsafe so the motherboard was shutting down the computer due to overheating, hence the hanging during installation. I have never seen a processor to be running that hot and still be functional, which I guess is to the credit of AMD.

By leaving the side panel off of my machine I was able to keep the average temperate down to 70-80°C, which has stopped the hanging and restarts but this is still way too high, so I need to take a serious look at cooling options for that case and CPU. To put it into context, the AMD Opteron 185 in my other machine runs between 40-50°C on average, and only goes over 50°C when under full load.

Right now until I get my test server hardware sorted out, and then install and configure all of the required software on the Fedora 6 OS (DHCP, DNS, Samba, Apache, PHP, MySQL etc.), all of my development work on this site and the Alpha Framework is on hold. Hopefully will be back to normal next week!

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Updated 2021 : note that the above post is out of date as it was originally published in 2007, but is left here for archival purposes.