After letting it cool down for a while, I managed to boot the computer. The internal backup drive was pretty hosed, so I had to mkfs.ext3 it and I’m doing a full backup again. Pretty soon I’d like to upgrade the machine to Fedora Core 7. I’ve got the DVD burned, so maybe I’ll give it a try tomorrow.
Category: Geekery
My home server is dying, possibly dead
Some months ago, the first virtual console on my home Linux box became “stuck” and wouldn’t respond. It wasn’t too much of an inconvenience so I didn’t bother much about it. A couple of days ago, I noticed that neither the CD drive nor the DVD burner was responding. Ok, I figured, I’ll have to schedule a reboot to fix that. Then last night’s backup failed when internal drive that my rack mount server backs up to suddenly decided it was read-only. I unmounted it, remounted it and it was ok. I restarted the backup and everything appeared to be running fine. But then a few hours later I noticed the CPU was pegged and two rsync processes were going crazy. Evidently the backup is screwing up again. I killed the backup, and decided I reboot it again as soon as I got home.
I was reluctant to take this step for a couple of reasons – first, it has 159 days of uptime. Second, it has always been a bitch to reboot. In the old days, it just wouldn’t recognize all the drives every time. Putting in a really really powerful power supply mostly cured that problem, but now it shows the BIOS screen showing all the disks, but then it just sits there not going any further. I can usually fix it with the reset button or power cycle.
I got home and found my office door had been closed, and so it was baking hot in the room with my computer. And when I rebooted, it wouldn’t come up. I’ve tried many of my old tricks, and it’s still not booting. I’m going to let it cool down, but if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll be shopping for another server. Problem is, I don’t *need* a new server. The current one has plenty of processing power, memory, and most importantly, lots of disk space. I suppose I’d like something that’s more energy efficient, but otherwise I don’t know what to shop for in these days.
Figures, doesn’t it?
The cube that backs on mine has sat empty for probably two years now. It’s recently been re-occupied. Not a problem, except the new occupant is A SPEAKER PHONE USER. So far, mostly of the second worst variety, that of the “using it on one-on-one conversation”, and not of the worst variety, the “using it to check voice mail”.
Somebody kill me.
WTF? Apache crashed.
It appears that my Apache server on my colo box died early this morning at 6:26, which is around log rotate time. The only anomaly in the logs is that it appeared to have problems killing one of the FastCGI processes, sending it SIGTERM twice and then SIGKILL. This has never happened before, and it’s somewhat annoying. Fortunately I was only off the air for two hours or so.
Probably not going to happen
Well, I heard back from the guy who wants to buy this domain. He said he’d meet my price, but wants to spread the payments over 5 or 6 years. Oh oh. A friend pointed out that this could very well mean that they’ll be out of business in 2 years, and I’ll have lost the domain and not gotten the full price for it.
So I’m sending him the following response.
Yeah, you see that to me is a big sticking point. As a former nordic racer, I’m all too aware that good ski shops go out of business at a horrendous rate, and the ones that don’t go out of business barely scrape by. I imagine it’s even worse now when you can order from a bazillion on-line shops instead of having to drive 30 kilometers to the next competitor who isn’t trying to sell you some plastic monstrosities with fish scales on the bottom.
So to me that says that if you don’t do better than your most optimistic predictions, I’ll get one or two years of payments, and then nothing. And that’s not worth it to me.
I’m not in the business of evaluating business plans, and while I know banks are often wrong, they *are* in the business of evaluating business plans, and if you can’t convince one of them that having “xcski.com” as your domain is worth what I’m asking and give you a small business loan on that basis, I’m not going to disagree with them.
I wish your business well, but I’m going to have to say no to giving up xcski.com. Like I said earlier, though, I have the domain xcski.net which I will part with for a much more reasonable price.
Oh well, that share in the Cessna 180 on straight floats was nice to dream about for a few hours.