Disaster (Hopefully) Averted

Okay, so here's the skinny on piggy. Everything seems to be running well again, and piggy should be doing better than ever. Over the weekend, I had a friend pick me up some decently-priced RAM. This RAM would take piggy from 256MB to 768MB. This is a huge increase when you're running Apache/MySQL/PHP/Python services. On Monday, I tried to quickly install the RAM when I got home from work. In doing so, I didn't disconnect any cables from the machine (I never do for these quick jobs), and just pulled it away from where it's stored. There was a little bit of tension when I pulled it away, but nothing serious. After installing the RAM, everything was fine, and I enjoyed the fact that FogBugz was snappier. Piggy had no issues at this point. I then went out to buy the M-Audio FireWire 1814, and couldn't get it running at all Monday night. At the first thing in the morning on Tuesday, I started to download the 10.3.9 combo updater, and then my net connection just stopped. I was convinced that it was the RAM that caused the problem. I quickly took the RAM out, and then tried the download again – same problem. This time, I fired up my homebrew LCD monitor and took a look at what was happening. It looked like my network card was on the fritz. So, piggy seemed to run without incident on Tuesday as long as I didn't do a full-speed download. Today (Wednesday), I put the RAM back in, and everything seemed okay. In the middle of the morning, I noticed that my mail connection from work was down. I had the machine rebooted, but some services weren't working properly. I had it rebooted again, and then it worked for the rest of the day. Just now, I finally solved the issue. It turns out that when I originally pulled piggy away from the wall, I put a little too much pressure on the network jack on one of my NICs. The network cable would not hold on correctly at all. I replaced the card with a similar model (thankfully I had one!), and now it seems to be fine. Since I prepared to spend more time on piggy, I decided to muck around in the kernel and get my chipset driver compiled in. So now, piggy is operating at 10x the HDD speed (DMA was off for so long), and with 3x the RAM. You all should notice a general improvement in the discussion groups, and this main page.