After repairing a Gira Control 19 Client, I sometimes receive faulty Gira Homeserver 3 units as well. There are a few typical causes of failure: the mainboard, the power supply, or the IDE dongle. Below I’ll go over the mainboard and power issues in detail, and then the IDE dongle replacement.

Mainboard

If the device doesn’t boot, the power LED stays off, or you hear a faint rattling sound when pressing the power button, the mainboard is likely at fault.
I’ve seen a lot with broken capacitors. Even if only one looks bad, check the rest, they’re probably also gone. A handy tool for testing capacitors (in-circuit!) is the Peak Electronics ESR70 Gold.

These are examples of bad/broken capacitors:

Bad capacitors (photo 1) Bad capacitors (photo 2)

The original Gira Homeserver 3 uses a VIA EPIA ML6000EAG board (some have the LN version). These boards are no longer made, and used ones on eBay or Alibaba often cost $200–400.

Dell Wyse Winterm J400 WT941GXL Thin Client

Replacement board option

A great alternative is a Dell Wyse Winterm J400 WT941GXL thin client. It includes a VIA EPIA 1000 mainboard that can replace the original. Or you can transfer your (Homeserver) IDE DOM to it directly and use this machine instead (it has great passive cooling). Note that you might need to reprogram the MAC address on the LAN adapter, as Gira uses that as the device’s serial number and the Homeserver software checks if it’s in a specific range.

Things to watch for when swapping the board to your Homeserver chassis:

If you want to transfer the mainboard of the Thin Client to the Gira Homeserver 3, you might face 3 challenges:

  1. Cooling – The thin client has a copper heatpipe cooler. You can bend and screw it onto the Homeserver 3 chassis.
  2. Front panel header – The VIA EPIA ML6000EAG has a 16-pin header; the VIA EPIA 1000 has a 12-pin one (pin 1 is at the > symbol). Use the pinouts below to match connections: 
    The VIA EPIA 1000 has a 12 pin header, the pins are (martked at pin1 with a > icon):
1  HDD_LED+        2
3  HDD_LED-        4 POWER_LED+
5  POWER_BUTTON    6 POWER_LED-
7  POWER_BUTTON    8
9  RESET_SWITCH    10
11 RESET_SWITCH    12
The pins at the Front_panel header of the Gira homeserver 3 are labeled at the PCB:

1 POWER_LED+       2 HDD_LED+
3 4 HDD_LED-       4
5 POWER_LED-       6 POWER_BUTTON+
7                  8 POWER_BUTTON-
9                  10 RESET_SWITCH+
11                 12 RESET_SWITCH-

    12 pin header of VIA EPIA 1000 board

  3. MAC address – Reprogram via bootable USB or interrupt the boot sequence. Also see this post.

Power Supply

If the power supply has failed or shorted,  you can replace it with a picoPSU-80. Be careful: you must rewire the power lines to the original IDE DOM, otherwise it will receive 12V instead of 5V, which will destroy it. (See the photo below for correct wiring)

IDE Dongle

If the IDE module is broken, you can either buy one yourself and image it manually or order a pre-imaged module.

  • Pre-imaged module: Buy it directly from schmidt213.de. If their order form is offline, just email them.
  • Buy an alternative: PQI DiskOnModule 128MB and image it yourself (see guides elsewhere on the forum/site).

Below are the photos of a VIA EPIA 1000 board inside the Homeserver 3 chassis with a new PicoPSU-80 and a bigger passive cooling.