There are two kinds of people...

... those who backup their data, and those who have never had a harddrive fail.

My server had a harddrive crap out right on schedule -- namely its annual schedule. Initially, it appeared that I'd irretrievably lost some news posts, but after a month of letting the failed drive sit on my desk collecting dust and angering me with its very presence, I tried to read from it and succeeded. Moral of the story: if something doesn't work, just feel really sorry for yourself and get pissy about it for awhile, and then retry precisely the same thing that didn't work the first time. That's a free life lesson for you kids.

As much fun as it's been having the server fail catastrophically on a semi-regular basis, I've decided to put an end to this little ritual. It seems that my frugal policy of using really old harddrives from the scrap pile was in fact not prudent. As with all things technical, the solution was to throw money at the problem. So I purchased a few shiny new harddrives. Four of them now sit comfortably in a full tower case, arranged as a raid-5 array. Three others now each reside in separate machines, each of which is going to mirror the entire website, along with most of the contents of the raid array. Over the next few weeks I'll be ironing out the details of how to configure things so that any of the three servers can assume responsibility for the network with little effort on my part.

As has historically been the case, I decided to horribly complicate the recovery process by insisting on migrating to an entirely new linux distro, with new tools and services that I'd never used before. This time around, it's gentoo and EVMS. Also, I'm now sufficiently annoyed by the site code, and the lack of a real DB that I'm going to finally switch to a real CMS. I'll try a few, and if nothing fits I'll probably bite the bullet and go homebrew, though I'd honestly rather not. I've got better things to do than implement my own CMS. But so help me I'll do it!

Anyway, that's why I've been awol for the last few months. The dust has started to settle though, and I've got some reviews to crank out, and a whole lot of industry angst to vent, so stay tuned!