First of all, a progress report:
“Elephant”, my new server, (actually, my old one, reborn) which has had a heartbeat for a day or two, now is up and talking to the rest of the network. Even better… the 50 or so gigs of music I’d left stranded on the D: Partition is readable. Now, granted that most of it, I’d managed to move over to “Bear”, my other server, before the array failed about a year and a half ago. But some of it, I had not. That I can even SEE that partition is a fluke; Usually, when the controller goes, you have about a 75% chance of losing the drive array’s data.. the new controller isn’t happy about picking up the old controller’s config. In this case, though, everything appears to be working, and working well.
But just on GP, I’ll copy down what I need, (A process likely to take several days) and then reformat the partition before putting Elephant into full service. Call me weird, but it’s kinda like a wrench head having an old car restored and working well again. It’s nice to have the old boy back.
Been thinking; Since he’s kinda slow, I guess the best service I can put him to would be as a backup; He’s got two tape drives and room for more. Now each night during the overnight hours, I have had every system on the network doing a complete disk dump to “Bear”. That process takes some SERIOUS room on Bear’s 500gb of drives.. compressed, around 40 gigs. I’m thinking have them do their dumps to Elephant instead and have him tape the result. directly from his drives. This would open up some more space on Bear, which is my more capable server.
Oh, that and he can handle the CD tower of 6 drives, to share to the LAN, of course.
And, dare I say this, I’m considering a motherboard replacement… if I can figure out what mother will work with this early (Version 3.5) ServerRaid card. It’d be nice to tuck a faster mother in the old case, and have it work with that card and the existing drives. The RAID controller is PCI, so you’d think it’d work… but I’ve seen a lot of strange proprietary stuff with IBM over the years.
-=-
By the way, I did try that SuperStacker II hub… the performance isn’t as good as the current day consumer grade switch… the collision rates, comparatively go through the ceiling. Too bad… it’s kinda neat to have it around, but I guess I can’t use it.
-=-
Christmas was a fine day, as I predicted. Most of the family gathered over at my sister’s place. She and her husband are planning on leaving for Florida very shortly. So, I likely won’t see them until May. Actually, I hope I don’t see them until May. Them coming back earlier, she and her husband, means something has gone wrong, most likely with her health.
We got lots of pictures, which I’m now preparing to share with the folks who were there. I’m finding that there’s some serious advantage, in having the additional memory card for the camera. Since I didn’t get one for Christmas how the looking for that.
Now that I know what I got for Christmas the practical side of me comes out and starts looking for solutions to problems I’ve been fiddling with sine late October. Example; I’ll be looking for a solution to my cell phone problem. I have one, a nice one, and it works well. But it also has a MP3 player in it, and I am considering whether or not I should use that feature on the phone or simply get a regular MP3 player and not mess with the phone. I’ll be looking around for a cheap one, to see what the prices are. I’d need to get some Mini SD memory and the $60 xfer kit to get the phone working. Might not be worth the money… but without someone telling me their experience with the thing in MP3 mode, I’ll never know.
-=-
(Ugh) I didn’t mean to, but I ended up over-eating today.
Oh, well, work tommrow, so I’m off to bed.