This last month flew by. It went just too fast. I started the month busy on projects and work, and looking forward to my long planned vacation to visit my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I left on July 10th for Pittsburgh with my son Sam, and my girlfriend Andrea, and it was too much fun. It was great to see the old stomping grounds, visit my old home, and hang with friends.
We ended up taking a rafting trip on the Middle Youghiogheny out of Ohiopyle, visited Laurel Caverns, driving around Brownsville, PA where my father grew up, ran around downtown Pittsburgh, rode the inclines (part of the mass transit system since the 1870’s!!), visited Westminster Presbyterian Church (where I went to church and was also a custodian), went hiking in Boyce-Mayview Park in some nice forests, went out catching fire-flies (lightning bugs), got some incredible Italian hoagies and pizza at Ardolino’s, ate at Primanti’s, and went to a Pittsburgh Pirate’s game. The week we were there was just not long enough … I’ll have to go back … maybe in the fall.
Of course while out of town, all sorts of crap started to fall apart back home in Utah! On the Friday night before returning (we were heading back on Tuesday the 17th!) two of my servers went down. One … an old NetWare server … the other was a Linux box. I had a friend go to my building in Heber City to see if he could recover the boxes … but both were out of commission. Ouch! The Linux box was a systems management box, and so it wasn’t too critical, but the NetWare server still had 20+ web sites hosted on it. And the calls began to come in. It sucked … there was nothing that I could do.
Upon returning to Utah on that Tuesday night, I hit the building and grabbed the two machines … recover attempts began that night. The NetWare server? Dead motherboard or RAM, so I chucked the hard disks into an old chassis I had laying around … moved the LAN cards over … booted and up it came! I ran some tests, allowed the hard disks to re-mirror (I was using RAID 1) and then it was ready to go. My Linux box? Ugh … dead as could be. The hard disk failed … it would spin up, but the controller card was dead. The mirror drive? Mis configured and useless. Time to start from scratch. I used the opportunity to upgrade the motherboard, memory, hard disks, and version of Linux … it took an extra day or so, but I have a much better machine now.
Of course I head into work on Wednesday, and while there … more failures. What the heck!?!?! I then spent that night at my building rebuilding another Linux box that had a failing SCSI drive. It was educational to say the least as I learned about how to juggle drive partitions to consolidate three SCSI disks worth of partitions onto my two remaining good drives. I actually did pull it off, and was able to get the server back up and running.
That next weekend, I took the time to do a *LOT* of preventative maintenance. I completely rearranged my server room, brought in the spare rack that I had, recabled, installed the new KVM switch that I bought 6+ months ago, and put in several new UPS units. In total … I spent another two full days over the weekend working on things over there.
And today? Well it’s now August 1st … and with all of that work and effort the rest of the month of July slipped right by me. I have a short list of things to do, but hopefully this month I can get back to coding and projects … I’ve got a lot of ideas that I want to turn into code this month!