A decade of chewing gum and duct tape

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

It all started fairly simply. A Win2K serverbox going click-click-click. Its hard drive paying the price of too many seeks. It was justthe Domain Controller. So transfer to the secondary. Before the domain promotion program hadcompleted on the second server, it too was makingthe 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 itcould be made into the domain controller if by a miracle I could get one of these two backup for a short spell. It wasn't to be. The first box was an OLD machine, its motherboardand case old enough it had ISA slots, and the old style AT PSU. The second box had aBIOS 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 barelyany better. The big server this is coming from had one of its raid drives fail. Thereplacement has been good, but the 2nd original drive is often noted have fallen outof 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 SCSIdrive.

The replacements are well on the way to beingintroduced into the wild: the older RAIDed boxwith Win2K3 on, and a new kid on the block with aCore Duo and RAID. I hope all this RAID'ing worksout!

So, just when I though I could relax... theFirewall Router loses its WAN port and we areplunged into Internet darkness. Give me a break!Thankfully, I have large piles of older stufflying 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!