I know what I want for Christmas.

I've recently been rereading the Godstalk series of books by P. C. Hodgell. Truly, they are amongst my most favorite fantasy novels ever. This time through I'm amazed to notice how many things I thought I had come up with for my own RPG writing was inspired by, or directly borrowed from  these books.

I actually own a signed, limited-edition leather-bound set of her writings as this was the only way I could get my hands on "Seekers Mask", the third book in the series.

On a whim I decided to check up on the books on Wikipedia, under the assumption that the series had come to an untimely end since it had been so long since the last book came out (1994).  Well, it seems that the series hasn't been abandoned, nor has P. C. Hodgell passed away as I was beginning to fear. She released a fourth novel in 2006, that I had never heard of, and has a fifth one due out any time now.

I am SO happy about this, you cannot believe. I started reading these books when they first came out, when I was just out of high school, and am still in love with them now some 25-or so years later. I'm going to be picking these books up as soon as I possibly can -- in hardcover, money permitting.

-1 for Documentation, but +2 for Stable Methodology.

So, I am in the middle of reconstructing a broken raid array, copying the images onto new media and essentially resurrecting my mail/web server. Actually, I was in the middle of all of that last weekend when I ran out of time and had to concentrate on other things that were momentarily more pressing.

So, today when I finally manage to get back to the job, I find I have 3 new drives, all 1 TB, all visually identical, some partitioned, some not, and I realize I haven't documented a single thing I was doing last week. Now, typically, if I am working on a server with critical data, like this one, I keep a log of what I'm doing as I go along. Both to make sure I didn't forget anything crucial, and to ensure that if I ever have to go back and solve a similar problem on that hardware, that I have a record of what worked and what didn't.

Well, I've been rather under a lot of pressure lately, and quite frazzled, and so I completely forgot to maintain a log of my work. At first I was completely dismayed. Why had I set up the partitions the way I had? What was on them? Were they raid images? Filesystems? Unformatted?

Then, luckily I was distracted and had to help taxlady put away groceries. While I was at it, I mentally started at square 1 and tried to decide how I would typically solve the problem of rebuilding the array. By the time I had gotten stuff put away, I had worked out a reasonable procedure in my head. Now, returning to the job at hand, its obvious exactly how far I had gone, and what I had been up to when I had to stop. Even the names I gave to certain mysterious image files suddenly made sense. Lets hear it for having a stable methodology that comes up with the exact same solution to a problem, when given the same inputs twice.

I shall now proceed to continue from where I left off last week.

Not My Day.

So, I'm in the middle of rebuilding the server and I start getting strange errors. Since there are known bugs in the VT8237r chip that's in the server, I immediately suspect that its having trouble with talking to two 1TB drives at once, or one of the data channels is bad, or something.

Nope, in the end it turns out that one of the three brand new drives was failing and has now completely failed. Even the diagnostic software from Western Digital says (in so many words) "Its toast -- ship it back".

Luckily, it wasn't the drive that I did 90% of the imaging to. I still have the majority of the image data. Alas it DID contain the image of the largest raid array in assembled form. I have all the individual partition images (plus whole drive images -- I get paranoid when doing this stuff, and I hope you can see why) but it would be a royal pain to rebuild the array image by hand, and I dislike remounting the failed drives except as a last resort. Luckily, I've been told that Trinity Rescue Kit is a LiveCD that contains software intended to automate building assembled raid images from partition images, so I'm going to try it out. If worst comes to worst, I've just lost a few days work.

But still:  GRUMPH!