What an awful Sunday, adriverhoef
Wish you the best of luck restoring electricity and crunching power
- because you did have a backup of the frontdesk registrations, didn't you

A week ago, suddenly one of the computers (not a desktop, it's more like an under-the-desk-top, because it's standing underneath the desk), a minitower model, started making a noise as if something was being dragged. Turning it off and on once seemed to cure the problem.
Some days went by and there it was again, the noise. We switched it off because the previous cure didn't help anymore.
Now the computershop that we used to visit for repairs and parts ceased to exist by the end of July (luckily we were informed) and we were advised to visit another computershop in a city nearby. So we brought the computer there and the diagnosis was that the bearing of the 'Be Quiet!' 600W power supply from 2016 was giving up.
So we bought a new power supply and installed it back at home with little difficulty. Now it's running quiet again.

By trying to install CentOS 8 on my laptop I was planning to run BOINC on that OS as a test. The installation fell short of expectations though, because CentOS failed in two ways so far: a) it failed to boot with numerous incantations of 'adm_iommu' and 'iommu', and b) with 'iommu=soft' and 'acpi=off' it finally booted very sweet, but it showed only 1 CPU core.

Back to Ubuntu, you would say. Because I had been using the former /var partition of Ubuntu to install CentOS, that part was overwritten by my CentOS installation test and lost in Ubuntu. I knew that I was overwriting the /var partition, so in preparation I had already edited the fstab file to remove the /var partition entry there. So when I booted Ubuntu, it did in fact boot successfully (Linux populates the /var partition by itself after booting). But still a lot is lost now, e.g. the system can't update anymore (which isn't a disaster, I wasn't planning to run updates for a while), because the /var/lib/dpkg directory has gone down the drain.

While I had /var/lib/boinc on Ubuntu as a separate partition all the time, that part wasn't lost, but the /var/lib/boinc-client directory ($HOME for user 'boinc') was lost. Still, despite all this, BOINC is running.

Yesterday one computer crashed, leaving it as dead as a doornail, causing a short circuit , which in turn caused another computer — with an uptime of 100 days — to halt. We took the offending computer to the computershop, where they replaced the powersupply by a new one. When we returned home in the evening, the computer could happily continue crunching.

I'm changing my internet provider, leaving my current one, so I have already signed up for this new one, and my new provider sent me a new modem.
The new modem was sent to me yesterday. I was at home at the time of 'contact' as the parcel would be delivered between 18:05 and 20:05, but the parcel delivery service 'missed me' at 19:49. So they were going to try today between 09:35 and 12:10. I was at home at 10:30 when the parcel was delivered with a signature. It was NOT my signature and the parcel was NOT delivered at my address. So I checked my neighbours, nothing, contacted the parcel delivery service in a chat, they couldn't check to which address (street) the driver delivered the package unless my new provider (the sender) ordered them to do so.
Then I went outside, it was raining, checked a neighbour opposite of the street, no answer, checked my house number in the L...street, checked my number in the W...street, checked my number in the B...street, no answer, checked my number in the K...street, checked 3 more neighbours, Henk, Max, David, nothing.

I still don't have any idea where the parcel went, nor who signed for it. I've contacted my new internet provider. They will send me a new modem.

That was a fantastic beginning of the day!

Adri