Ahhhhhhh I'm back, with a working server once more.

What had happened is that my old Motherboard had gone 'phut', so needed replacing. Could have been much worse - could have been the hard drive, with associated data loss.

Here's the culprit:

Still, not so easy to replace at short notice when I'm mostly in Newcastle at the moment, and the time I have at home has other priorities. And once the Mobo was replaced, I discovered that it took a different kind of RAM to the old (now discontinued) one, so that was another trip to PC World for the sake of speed.

So now I have a nice EPIA M motherboard (and new stick of RAM) in my home server, and I'm back on the air. A huge thanks to Kevin at indigospring for diagnosing the problem. He also fixed my previously dead iPod which had resisted all the solutions Apple had provided, other than splash out on a new one. Cheers Kevin!

Oh, and for the benefit of Google, here's a link to the EPIA-M Mini-ITX Mainboard Manual, including schematics and connection instructions, as VIA have seen fit not to include clear enough instructions with the Mobo.