20070820

LIFE - I don't suffer fools lightly....

Wish I didn't spend so much time blogging about the negative nowadays. If you want the positive in my life at the moment, checkout my wife or my daughter’s blogs. You're supposed to accentuate the positive and all. However, being so busy with everything nowadays, it really takes something out of the ordinary to rouse me to blog. Such as:

This page

...And therefore:

Meh!

...Oh. While I'm here. Due to a power supply failure in the disk storage enclosure attached to our server at home, two drives dropped out of our RAID5 array, breaking the array and rendering the data inaccessible. Attempts to tell the controller "The drives are there. You are okay." didn't result in much. So I ran some array analysis software called RAID Reconstructor from Runtime Software (Who I presume don't mind me linking to their web page) and it wasn't able to detect the array config for cloning. So we've logged a call with them and they do a deeper analysis and fingers (And toes, and hair and eyes) crossed, hopefully they can assist with cloning the array so we can recover the data. If they are successful, it will cost US$299, but that is a fee I will gladly pay at this stage. A local crowd in NZ quoted NZ$3500 (Plus sundries) and they said that was discounting the price since I wasn't a business.

Now since I don't suffer fools lightly, you can imagine that, here I am, and IT engineer, and yes, yes, yes, I had no backups. I know. Dumbest thing in the whole world. Moronic. Idiotic. Utterly stupid. In my defence, when the array was built, I sunk all our funds in to the drives that make up the array, and couldn't afford a disk to back the approximately 500+ GB of data on the array. Well. We have our photos and music backed up to my portable drive. And since the array was built, backups have been out-of-sight, out-of-mind. So. Here's hoping...

Lastly, while updating my blog, I've just received a call from the Young New Zealanders' Foundation, part of who's focus is working to address the fact that New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world (Which I fail to understand, with Godzone being one of the best places in the world to live). So if you've got a sec, and you think "I haven't made a charitable donation to anyone in a while" (And it is a crowded, competitive market), have a look at their website, and have a think.