No More Soldering!
I had this ‘brilliant’ idea to mod my network cards & case for the Monet router so that I could have network activity indicators (LEDs) on the front. In a sense this is fairly straight forward, solder wires going to the new LEDs onto the ’stubs’ on the underside of the card.
I’ve done some soldering before, but I’m not exactly good at it. I decided just to be on the safe side I would do only one of the two LEDs on only one of the two network cards. No major issues during the soldering, network cards lit up and I have the secondary LED working too, so I get ready to celebrate my achievement with some apple pie and tea. I sit down at the computer and realize that I cannot ping the router… uhoh. What could be wrong?
I hook up a monitor and keyboard to the router and realize I can’t ping the internal network. I reboot, blah blah, still nothing. I make the assumption that I have somehow damaged the network card, remove it, get a new one… still doesn’t work and I get this “kernel: eth1: PCI error 0×800000″ in the message log for either of the cards in that PCI slot. I take the new card and put it in the last remaining PCI slot and amazingly it works perfectly.
I didn’t ruin the network card. . . I ruined the PCI Slot?! The only thing I can think of occuring was that perhaps a tiny spec of solder got onto the connectors and lodged itself into the slot… I find that somewhat hard to believe, as I would have expected any solder ’stray’ solder to have fallen off… and it wasn’t like I was being messy and getting solder everywhere, lol.
I did a bit of googling for that error and the two hits both dealt with this model of Netgear card; I found that rather interesting, but not exactly helpful. That sort of error is apparently a parity problem… it rather bothers me that I probably fucked up the PCI slot… but for now it isn’t too important since I don’t technically ‘need’ the slot. It just hampers any future expansion, heh… since I sort of toyed with the idea of eventually adding a wireless card… I guess I’ll check it carefully later.
No more soldering for me… at least when it comes to potentially damaging pricey hardware.