So, the week then.
Tuesday I got home from work at about 20:00 as usual. I discovered that atoll, my main server and home to my life, documents, music and email was thrashing at a 50.00 load average and the terminal was spewing out line upon line of “DriveSeek Failed” errors. This was not an unknown error, Atoll’s previous hard drive (Identical make and model) died in a similer way about a year and a half ago. The drive can read fine, but as soon as you try to write to it it thrashes the computer completely. I ended up buying the replacement drive (the one that has just died) and eventually (about two months ago) sent the old one off to be repaired. So I sat and swore at the drive for a while, redirected my email, powered off the computer, and wished I had more time to deal with this.
At this point, there was a doorbell. Nobody apart from the Jehovahs Witnesses and the Pizza People use our doorbell, so at 9pm this was unexpected.
It was, in fact, our neighbour. He was delivering a package that UPS had failed to.
It was the replacement hard drive.
The timing of this was so incredibly fortuitous that my immediate reaction was to install the drive and start copying the data. This was hastily kyboshed. The last thing I want to do is replace the dead drive with the same model that has died so faithfully twice before.
Wednesday I got atoll to stay together long enough to be able to edit /etc/fstab so that the broken partition (it was only one partition this time) was mounted read only, which means the server is back together until next month, when I can buy a new hard drive. Eventually, I decide to put the replacement 120 gig drive into my desktop, where it doesn’t matter so much if it dies. I resolve to do this at the weekend.
Thursday
Can you guess what happens Thursday?
- Everything works perfectly.
- The main server dies
- The main server explodes
- The hard drive in my desktop dies.
Anyone who went for the forth option can have a cookie.
This has been a bad hardware week.