Redundant Array of Invisible Discs

I had here an old Dell server with a failed RAID array – the drives were completely unresponsive, and every diagnostics tool came up clean. So all you can do is pull the whole system apart piece by piece until you get somewhere.

Thankfully life came back, possibly the PSU just can’t handle the juice, since things started working well once an unused SATA expansion came out. One of the two drives was now being reported as degraded, so it wouldn’t join the array. A quick verify and the Adaptec tool then allowed the array to be rebuilt.

I love it when it all works out in the end.

My cat is a murderer!

And she has a loud bell around her neck! This cat has mastered the art of the hunt.

This week’s office

Setting up some nice small Acer laptops and a desktop, great systems for what they cost. Core2duo with 3GB RAM, but funky keyboards with the tiny shift key on the left, I couldn’t get used to it and hugged my little Dell laptop with its big fat shift key after.

I need to re-roll a proper XP install disk with SP3 and all the trimmings. Four systems pulling all those Windows Updates without a local WSUS cache takes forever on a dinky cable modem. Why can’t we get cheap fibre like the rest of the world?

Tuna Cat strikes again

Oh no, she’s catching snakes now too. Poor thing.

Salty’s

Its family weekend holiday time, we’re in Penticton where its blazing hot as usual. First stop: Salty’s for some of their amazing seafood curry. That alone is worth the five hour drive.

Its 6:30 AM now, Erik woke us all up, and its barely cool outside. I’m enjoying not drowning in my own sweat as long as I can, I know as soon as the sun gets its grip on the skies we’re in for some more scorching heat.