First trip to Micro Center
Due to a failure in our internal server’s disk drive system, Robert and I took a trip out to Micro Center. Robert’s intoduction to geekdom in retail went quite well. He seemed to enjoy rolling around looking at all the cool stuff; the internal cables seems to be his favorite, but the motherboards were also interesting to him.

The jury is still out the disk system failure; we procured spares and replacements in the hope of preventing such a catastrophic failure in the future. The mirrored raid array which I expected to protect me from such problems never noticed the problems that resulted in a lack of usable data on either of the hard drives. Charitably, the raid controller uses it’s own format for the disk and that’s why I was unable to find anything useful on either drive — less charitably….

So I’m dropping raid 1 mirroring and this time I’ll manually rsync the main disk’s data to a backup disk nightly (in addition to the afternoonly backup of the data of interest and the monthly backup of the full file system to an external drive stored off site. (While I’m in the process of re-installing an OS (not from Redmond), I remain hopeful that the backup data is here without the need to resort to the external drive.)

Oh, and did I mention that I was all set for the restore (new toys on hand, Robert happily asleep) when we lost power (along with 45,398 of our closest Northern Virginia friends) last night? Hence the web site outage — the UPS is good for minutes, not hours. And the internal server outage is the reason behind any email bounces about no route to host. There was no functional host to route to.

Back to the OS install…..