After my power-supply died a few weeks ago which took down my website and other things, I managed to get things back up and running in just a few days. About a week after this however it turned out all the commotion was too much for the previously trusty 7-year-old hard disk that I had powering my server and it gave up the ghost forever.
Fortunately I managed to get the data off it but this took a good couple of days of trying, most attempts were just a stream of errors printed to dmesg which is never a good sign, then one cold morning it just started working, long enough to copy the database dump that is the heart and soul of this and a few other web sites I host.
Since the purchase of the old hard disk, technology had moved on and instead of buying more antiquated junk I scavenged the only working PATA hard disk I had left. Unfortunately this happened to be the one hosting my home PC operating system so this wasn’t a small task. But it worked so instead of spending £25 on an 80GB PATA disk which had probably spent 2 years sat on a factory shelf, I spent £40 on a 500GB SATA disk for my home PC and looted it’s boot disk.
So here we are, back up and happily buzzing away, not bad for a PC that resembles more Frankenstein’s monster than your common shiny 2U rack-mounted DELL webserver with all mod-cons. I’m hoping this will be the last time I have wake up the data-centre security team for some time.
