Hell of a week
This has been a very challenging week. Work hasn't really been pissing me off in any "typical" way, but it's still been a pain this week. We've been having problems with our phone system's primary DS1 line. Seems to happen a lot when the whether gets wet or rainy. Obviously there's something up with the telco's exterior wiring (probably at a nearby junction box or all the way up in the hanging lines), but as always the service provider would rather blame our equipment than fix their damn wiring. And it doesn't help that the errors are intermittent and seem to mostly subside by the time they get around to running remote tests on the line. I swear, if I get one more tech calling me saying, "I only saw errors when looping through the far-end CSU, so the problem must be in the CPE..."
Aside from that, my primary computer suffered a bit of a minor meltdown. On Monday evening, one of my hard drives suddenly started throwing errors about root metafile corruption. I quickly figured OK, this is my oldest drive and apparently it's just reached an untimely end. So I picked up a nice big drive from Micro Center the next day and figured I'd rearrange some drives, restore from my backups as needed, and get up and running again. So I finally got the new drive installed and formatted by the time I got home from work on Wednesday (had to perform the various tasks in between going to work each day, going to a Youmacon meeting, and getting my requisite night's sleep each night), and I was horrified to find that I was getting a similar error from the new drive when I tried to access it. Feeling a cold and unsettling hunch in the pit of my stomach at this point, I externally cabled the "dead" drive I'd removed, and after a bit of troubleshooting, I confirmed my dreadful hunch: it wasn't the drive that failed, it was the particular SATA header on my mainboard. Fortunately, I resisted my usual childish urge to just go and order a new mainboard as I realized that I could use the remaining good headers and swap out my other large auxiliary drive for the new gigantic one I'd just purchased. Put all the data on the one drive, and I'd still have far more total space than I did before the failure. I got everything copied and restored to the one large drive, and I left the system running a final low-level verification of the new disk this morning on my way out to work. If that comes back clean, I'll just wait and see what happens. I'm just concerned about the possibility that this "simple" failure may precede additional failures, which might be more serious. Well, if I don't have to buy expensive replacement hardware, I'd rather not, so I'll wait to see what happens (and keep my backups current, of course). If more components or hardware functions fail, I'll just have to bite the bullet and order a new mainboard. Hopefully it doesn't come to that *knock on wood*.
Aside from that, my primary computer suffered a bit of a minor meltdown. On Monday evening, one of my hard drives suddenly started throwing errors about root metafile corruption. I quickly figured OK, this is my oldest drive and apparently it's just reached an untimely end. So I picked up a nice big drive from Micro Center the next day and figured I'd rearrange some drives, restore from my backups as needed, and get up and running again. So I finally got the new drive installed and formatted by the time I got home from work on Wednesday (had to perform the various tasks in between going to work each day, going to a Youmacon meeting, and getting my requisite night's sleep each night), and I was horrified to find that I was getting a similar error from the new drive when I tried to access it. Feeling a cold and unsettling hunch in the pit of my stomach at this point, I externally cabled the "dead" drive I'd removed, and after a bit of troubleshooting, I confirmed my dreadful hunch: it wasn't the drive that failed, it was the particular SATA header on my mainboard. Fortunately, I resisted my usual childish urge to just go and order a new mainboard as I realized that I could use the remaining good headers and swap out my other large auxiliary drive for the new gigantic one I'd just purchased. Put all the data on the one drive, and I'd still have far more total space than I did before the failure. I got everything copied and restored to the one large drive, and I left the system running a final low-level verification of the new disk this morning on my way out to work. If that comes back clean, I'll just wait and see what happens. I'm just concerned about the possibility that this "simple" failure may precede additional failures, which might be more serious. Well, if I don't have to buy expensive replacement hardware, I'd rather not, so I'll wait to see what happens (and keep my backups current, of course). If more components or hardware functions fail, I'll just have to bite the bullet and order a new mainboard. Hopefully it doesn't come to that *knock on wood*.