...but you all knew that, right? No Somewhere Else Entirely this week, due to forces beyond my control. The chapter's about half written, and my muse is anxious for me to continue, but...
One of the three "servers" in the cupboard in Mission Control has gone Phut. Not the one I'm connected to now, and thank $DIETY not the one that has been my firewall for too many years...
No, it's the one with 300 hours of TV on it, and the fix isn't a simple one. I already tried that, of course, and it just sat there and looked at me. I need to give it the motherboard and power supply of the main server, and build a new main server with new components. Long story, the hardware is all fairly old (by today's standards) and there's something wrong with the operating system which means I can't apply any updates :(
So, I've spent two days being depressed and grovelling around with screwdrivers and cables and drives and cards, knowing that I'm going to have to spend out money I don't really have that I'd rather spent on oooh! shiny!
Upshot is that I'm going to be entirely off-line for at least a day while I build myself a new main server and get it functional. I might be able to drop by and read news but that's about all. This won't happen till Saturday 21st May at the earliest, and then I can get back to doing what I want to - write more story!
The money's going to come from savings but in this case I'm making sure it will be well-spent, as the new box I'll be building is intended to last us for a good while into the future. I know, good intentions and all that!
So, expect the next chapter towards the end of next week. Grovelling apologies again.
Penny
Comments
By the sounds of things...
...there's a chance the hard drive may be salvageable, so hopefully you'll be able to access your virtual video library again once the box is rebuilt.
If you can afford to, it would probably be worthwhile investing in a portable hard drive to make occasional backups - you don't want to repeat the experience of the Crystal Hall server - apparently that backed up to elsewhere on the same hard drive, so when the hard drive went kaput, so did the last two years worth of forum posts.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Hard drive
That would be hard drives, plural.
I had encountered a problem with the daily TV schedule updates taking forever, and decided to upgrade the OS and program (mythtv) to see if that fixed it. That worked OK...
When I put the box back in the cupboard it seemed somewhat noisier than I remembered. Crap. Listened carefully, decided that one of the two 360Gb dedicated media drives had gone (or was about to go). Ordered two new ones, since they were both the same age...
Disconnected each one to try and find out which one it was, no difference in the noise. Crap. Looked at motherboard, CPU fan spins slowly, rear fan not moving, bad smell, someone let the magic smoke out...
Crap. I'm assuming the PSU is gone, since the motherboard looks OK, but I don't know if the motherboard was damaged on the way. So I've ordered a new motherboard (low power), memory, new 19" rack case and PSU, which I will set up as my main server. The original main server board and PSU I know are man enough (woman enough?) to handle the media work so I will swap them over. I'll also swap out the old disks (if I can read them :P) and keep the old ones as standbys. My Brain hurts.
So, while I'm building a new main server I will be off-line and all my story sources will be unavailable. I do nightly backups to tape and I'll do another Full backup before I start rebuilding, just in case. The problem with the video data is, there's just so much of it. Practically, it can only be backed up to another disk of the same size, and no, RAID is not a backup method! (In this case, since it was the PSU that failed, no amount of RAID would have helped.) I'm not bothered about the data, it's 'just TV' after all. (Do you know how long backing up 720Gb to an external USB drive takes? Hint: enough time for a full three-course dinner in a not-so-nearby restaurant.)
At the moment I'm just sitting waiting for the Delivery Man to arrive with my new oooh! shiny!
As I said before, Life Sucks. Thank you for being so patient with this insignificant one.
Penny
Life sucks
Penny, I hope that you don't have to spend all that money.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Gone
It's gone, Stan. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and pay out. Now, strictly, what I'm replacing is a non-essential service, and I know there are those who come here who are barely managing to keep a roof over their heads, but all my IT equipment is quite old and almost all of it has needed replacing for some time.
So, this gives me an opportunity to build in a little future-proofing, since I have to replace kit anyway. By 'quite old' I can tell you that the monitor I'm sitting at is 10 years old, and second-hand from the dot-com I worked for then; my firewall box is 16 years old. Practically all of it is power-hungry since it is so old and I'd rather spend capital once than pay raised power bills every month. Since we have a limited income we're doing all we can to reduce our monthly bills.
Thank you for your concern, it is most appreciated.
Penny