Woe is me.

On the weekend I told _sps_ that I was about one day away from getting the mail system on Webigail finished. All I needed was one day where I was free to work on it. Well, now was supposed to be the time. I was just finishing up my 'moring' email read when I came across an interesting option for my firewall config. One that I'd even been wondering about.

Okay, log into firewall and try it. It works, great! Now, back up the change. No go. Hard drive not responding.  Hmm. Check this, that and the other. No dice.

Decide to reboot and see what happens. Disk doesn't even spin up. Uh oh.

So, I dug up an old floppy-boot for my firewall machine and booted it up. But I haven't updated it since I got the new web server, which is in its own firewall zone, on its own physical segment.

So, I can post this, but none of my websites is up right now. Not good.

I have spare hard drives, and I even have an entire spare old computer should it be the controller and not the drive that's busted. Either way, its gonna take me a while to fix, and if I have actually lost the contents of the main drive, its going to take me a while to restore.

Now, I DO have a backup, only is on another partition of that same drive. I have another other backup on this machine I'm typing on now, but its a few months out of date. Oh well, if you don't see a lot of posts from me today, its because I'm hard at work. Grumph.

I'm Baaack.

So, the firewall is up and running, and I'm still not sure what went wrong. I took the old firewall apart, and made sure all the cables were in place. Yup. Then I put the firewall's HD in my main machine and checked it out. It works fine, and I made a quick backup of it, just in case.

Then I put it back in the firewall and tried to boot it. No dice. No clicks, no whirrs, nothing. Then I tried it on the other IDE cable, just in case. Still nothing.

Hokay, I pull an old C-drive off a shelf and try it. It clicks, but doesn't go. I try it on the other cable and it goes.  Hmmm.

I put the old drive back on that cable. It works perfectly. Double Hmmm.

I put the whole dang thing back together and it boots first time.

My best guess at the moment is that the power supply was overheating and since the HD is currently the largest draw in the box, it was the first thing to notice.

Anyway, the supply is full of cruft which I should blow out of there with some compressed air. I'm planning a trip to the shop soon to get taxlady a replacement video card, and I should try and pick up a can of air while I'm there. Until then, I'm just gonna leave the cover off of the firewall so it can breathe a bit better.

Why am I awake?

I fell asleep around 3:00 pm. So, why on earth am I awake now??? I dunno.

I awoke with one nostril completely closed off and a nagging headache. The first is usual, the second not so. I've taken the remedy for the one and can now breathe again, and i'm waiting for the pills to kick in to fix the second. After that, more sleep!