A decade of chewing gum and duct tape

Hardware losses this year are incalculable! I have lost at least 3 servers, 2 power supplies, a router, and numerous hard drives. It has been a hard year - and the year ain't over either!

It all started fairly simply. A Win2K server box going click-click-click. Its hard drive paying the price of too many seeks. It was just the Domain Controller. So transfer to the secondary. Before the domain promotion program had completed on the second server, it too was making the same click-click-clicking noises.

Before I could get another box up and at it, both domain controllers were unbootable. I held out hope that another box, with Win2K3 on it could be made into the domain controller if by a miracle I could get one of these two back up for a short spell. It wasn't to be. The first box was an OLD machine, its motherboard and case old enough it had ISA slots, and the old style AT PSU. The second box had a BIOS date of 1997. Hummm, maybe I got my monies worth out of those machines.

Anyway, I started to bring up the 3rd computer, when its hard drive also failed catastrophically. It wasn't my Summer.

Over in the Linux corner, things were barely any better. The big server this is coming from had one of its raid drives fail. The replacement has been good, but the 2nd original drive is often noted have fallen out of the RAID group. Yuck! Then the Mail server went. Lord knows how old this box was. It was a Pentium II processor flying at a heady 266Mhz, with a 4.5 GB SCSI drive.

The replacements are well on the way to being introduced into the wild: the older RAIDed box with Win2K3 on, and a new kid on the block with a Core Duo and RAID. I hope all this RAID'ing works out!

So, just when I though I could relax... the Firewall Router loses its WAN port and we are plunged into Internet darkness. Give me a break! Thankfully, I have large piles of older stuff lying around and I was able to shovel a new ( old) router firewall into the breach.

And I do all this in the name of fun!? Hah!