Hello Internet! In this blog post, I will talk about a big outage I faced and how I ended up breaking some of my servers. I have experienced several outages that have taken down many services. One example is the outage in August 2025, which brought down all of my servers and even bricked my Raspberry Pi 5 running Pi OS. The cause remains a mystery to this day. However, this has been the first time that hardware damage was caused.
Introduction
It all started when I was getting prepared to go on a trip to Italy. My UPS is a CyperPower CP900EPFCLCD. It has a major flaw though.It has a chance of leaking some dangerous fluid (or something else, I don't remember) which may cause a fire. Because of this, every time I leave the house for long periods of time, I unplug all my devices and put them on my normal power strip and leave only the NAS on the UPS to ensure that my data is safe. In the morning of February 21, 2026, I was preparing to leave to go to the airport. I shut down my servers, put them on the power strip and waited for them to boot. After everything had booted, I opened Beszel on my phone to check if everything has working properly and saw that the temperature of the GMKTec G3 Plus was unusually high. Going on Proxmox, I saw that some containers where not starting, erroring or restarting. In addition to that, the mini-PC was restarting every 2-3 minutes. Because I was in a rush, I decided to stop some of the big services like the Minecraft server and left. In the plane I migrated most of the services to my laptop. I also noticed that the fan was not working and it was not detected by s-tui or any other monitoring software.
Initial diagnosis.
After returning, I started my usual hardware debug problem. First, I tried a reboot. It didn't work. I then tried a hard reboot by unplugging the power. Still nothing. After that, I plugged the mini-PC to my monitor and keyboard and opened the BIOS. I saw that the fan was not detected there either. I came to the conclusion that the fan was dead. I decided to disassemble the mini-PC to see what the problem was. I took the fan out, tried to spin it manually and noticed it was stiff.
First attempts at finding a solution.
I decided to order a new one. For this mini-PC, it was easier said than done. At first, I tried searching for a GMKTec G3 Plus fan. Nothing, just random fans that didn't work on AliExpress. Then, I tried searching for the exact model, still nothing. After a lot of searching, I decided to be the one that seemed the most relevant. The story doesn't end here however. After about one and a half week from ordering the fan, my Pi had a reboot while I was at school. When I came back home, I noticed that it's fan had stopped. I ordered a new active cooler and while I was waiting, I did the same thing I did to the mini-PC, I started shutting down services I didn't need. The main service I stopped was the Minecraft server (Which I had migrated to the Pi). About 3 days after the Pi incident, both fans arrived. However, when I tried to install it, it didn't work. The connector was not the right one. I cut the connector from the old fan and put it on the new one and still nothing. I then tried to change the fan for the Pi at least. I shut it down unplugged it, removed the old cooler and put the new one back in. And nothing. Not only did the fan not start, but the Pi was not booting. It's LED was solid RED. I followed my standard debugging process. First, I try booting from a USB flash drive with a fresh Pi OS installation. Then, I try using the bootloader recovery image. While doing that, I noticed that the led on the USB flash drive was off, suggesting that the USB ports where not receiving power. Plugging my phone in confirmed this It did not charge. Unfortunately, I cannot test the display output as I don't have the right HDMI adapter for the Pi.
Aftermath and solution
This was a terrible experience. I am now stuck with an old laptop as my only server, the one currently hosting this website. It only has 4GB of RAM so it can't run anything big. My Pi, which I bought a few months after it's release has died. The NAS still works but I use it mostly for storage running Immich, Jellyfin and some network shares. Because of this, and because I don't want to spend more money on a new Pi or mini-PC (especially with the rising hardware prices), I decided to buy a used Thinkcentre. The one I ordered cost about 60 euros and has an Intel Core i5-4690T, 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD. Currently, it runs my website, my main Pi-Hole node, a Home Assistant Docker container and a private Minecraft SMP as well as all the other containers the Pi was running.