Posted on 2008-10-03 15:00:00
Tags: Rant, Computers
The only thing missing which would explain everything is the date of when this all happened: It wasn't Friday the 13th...
Yesterday at noon I asked OfficeWorks to scan in and copy my employee contract with the new company I am going to work for (you don't know yet? You will soon). Nothing too fancy I thought. But when I picked up the paperwork, I was missing the original of my employee contract... Yes, that is the most important part of it I thought. Twenty minutes later they found it, it was still laying in one of the drawers of one of the copiers. On my way home, I found out in the chaos that they hadn't returned my USB stick with the scanned in documents neither...
When I was home, I got an urgent phonecall to not leave the house because the love-of-my-life had forgotten her keys. Assuming that she was on her way back, I stayed in the garden... a little bit longer than normal on the toilet... I watched a TV show... Cleaned up the garage a little bit... And two hours later she finally came home.
In the evening, Dirkie insisted in not eating anything from his plate. But he was very keen on having pasta, noodles, sprinkles, vegimite, sausage etc. So one and an hour later he ate the tiniest piece of bread of his plate, nearly choked on it so bad did it taste and finally was allowed to leave the table.
Normally when the two children are in bed, I have time to do things. Not today, not today. I made myself a nice cup of tea and Naomi came into the room with Hanorah on her arm saying that the little one had thrown up. I've been babies bringing up a lot of different kind of foods and in a vast varity of amounts, but this was really a new record... So I had to change the bed sheet, the sheet under it, the donah cover and turn the mattrass around...
Half an hour later, Hanorah back to bed and I try to stay awake to figure out what has happened in the virtual world of the FreeBSD community. Except that the last line of the screen of my computer said "INSERT BOOT DISK OR PRESS ENTER TO REBOOT". Rebooting resulted in a dreaded tick-tick-tick of the harddisk and the same message. We'll find out tomorrow what has happened here, it has RAID1 somewhere in the BIOS and I never got an alert from that that it didn't work.
Luckely I was too tired to worry about it, otherwise I would not have slept and would have been even more tired than I am now.
In the morning, I disconnect the two disks from the RAID1 array and hooked them up one by one to find out which one was the broken one. Finding the broken one is simple, just listen to the tick-tick-tick. Booting the correct one, that hasn't been accomplished yet...
Off to the shop and buy a bunch of new disks, and this time we'll use the FreeBSD Geom Mirror software! A bargain, 500Gb disks for AU$ 99.- and 1Tb disks for AU$ 199.-. And at home, I found out that one of them didn't work, it showed up as 32Gb in the BIOS, and that the other one worked fine. Back to the shop only to find out that they don't have other 1Tb disks...
So worst case I lost all my unread mail (YAY!), all my BarNet related software (which could be a good thing considering I don't do software development for them anymore) [this sounds like my computer wanted to make a clean start too!], all my RSS feeds and all my Seamonkey bookmarks and saved passwords (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAI). Plus my FreeBSD checked-out Subversion trees with all the patches I have submitted in the last year but have not been commited yet.
For the good thing: I finally will move to a different window manager, because fvwm95 is getting a little bit old (hey, it's 2008 :-) For now I will use vtwm and I hope I can get the control-left-right-up-and-down to work to change virtual desktops.
In the mean time, if you have a hardware RAID solution: MAKE SURE IT WORKS!
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