Resurrection
I have been pretty sick since last night, which is probably why I have the time to post here today 
I seem to have some kind of stomach bug right now which is keeping me in close proximity to my bathroom. But, inbetween bathroom breaks, I have been able to check my email at least, which is what started this whole ordeal.
While I was reading emails today I received one from my buddy Joel, who reminded me that I *still* have not gotten my stuff off my old servers. You see, when I moved here, I moved a month before my wife and daughter so that she could finish her school year. As such, I made a whole new computer infrastructure here and left all the old stuff running for my wife and daughter until the time of their move. At that time I just shut the old servers off there and shoved them into the car believing that I would get the stuff off of them sometime later on and add it to my new servers. Well, like I told Joel, I have succeeded in procrastinating for the last 8 months and that has never happened. Until today that is…
In a fit of boredom, I decided to grab those two servers out from underneath my endtable and finally pull all my important files off of them. I should probably preface this with the fact that I had *thought* I had all those files backed up somewhere, in fact, I thought they were backed up on an external usb drive *and* on cd/dvd. Guess what? Nope. Couldn’t find any of that anywhere, and that’s when scared the hell outa me when I finally plugged the servers in. You see, the first server is an old *old* NetBSD box (1.6.1) which I had used as an NFS server. The problem is that it had sat around for so lng that the hard drive was suffering from stiction. I booted the machine up 3 or 4 times trying to get it to start and then it hit me that I couldn’t find those backups. I started to get real worried. But, after a minute or three I resorted to the old rule “if it’s broke, kick it and try again”. So I dropped the thing on the table a couple times and magically the had drive decided to finally spin up so I could get my data off. The other server behaved much better, however, I had forgotten I had moved ssh to a nonstandard port, which took me a minute to correct.
At this point, I actually have all my old data in my laptop, and I can start to get things moved around to where they should go. Now I can finally do something with the old hardware hanging around in my livingroom too! I bet my wife will be ecstatic about that, until she realizes that she’s probably going to have to be the one to take that stuff to the storage facility
Anyhow, the moral of the story is twofold: #1 – Do your backups, and #2 – If it doesn’t work, kick it and then check again 
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008