Archive - Oct 2004

Briefly: I had a power surge that took out my webserver's hard disks (70G worth up in smoke). This was despite the surge protection that I installed after something similar happened last year. Don't really know what went wrong. Thankfully for offsite backups, courtesy of my Sourceforge shell account and rsync I haven't lost my posts. I've lost a lot of other things, but hopefully nothing critical.

Now to continute putting all the peices back together again.

Both hard disks from Saturn are toast. At least the motherboard and other bits and pieces are okay. I've managed to scrounge a coupl eo fo hard dists that were lying around, so I should be able to get a new server setup shortly. In the meantime I'm trying to get Jupiter up and running to fulfill the basic tasks. Like serving DNS requests for kemitix.net. Currently putting on webmin to make that easier.

Installing Postfix was a good idea. Pity I forgot to redirect port 25 (SMTP) to that server rather than to the dead one. Seeing as I host my own DNS server, or at least Saturn did, even that wouldn't have helped. There wasn't any thing saying, "Yes, I'm Kemitix.net, and if you want to send email to anyone here then here is the mail server, a.k.a. MX. So now I need to install Bind and Apache. I did try Apache before I left for work, but it bombed with a compilation error of some sort.

I've just put in a copy of Postfix on Jupiter that is now redirecting all my emails to my GMail account. So I can at least get my email.

During power brown-outs or surges less than an hour ago the kemitix.net (saturn) server went down. It no longer recognises the book drive, and this is despite the power-surge protection I put in place when thsi happened early last year. I need to take Saturn apart and see what I can do to try and bring it back to life. Thankfully I do actually have something approximating a backup system in place, which means that the vast bulk of my personal files and the contents of the Kemitix.net site are safely located on off-site machines.

For the first time since 14th September I've made it into work before 9am. Unfortunately that time in September was a one-off. Looking back over my previous time sheets, which I never bother to submit, I see that I have made it into work on-time only a literal handful of times since July 2003. That's 15 months worth of coming in late. Staying late two or three nights a week keeps my Flexi-Time in credit, but I'm surprised it hasn't been noticed before.

The Vor Game was delivered to me me at work yesterday. Eleven days isn't anything to complain about, although I've had books delivered from the States about a third of that time. Not that I was in hurray for this book - I won't be reading it till some time during next year.