Downtime......weak postage.....fun...

I guess I did those a little out of order. Should have started with the "weak postage" first since that is what this blog post is.

No cool tech info to talk about....No interesting tidbits of news that I think may not be posted anywhere else easily discoverable Just me making sure I get my post in for the day. I suspect that out of 365 posts that some will end up like this. However, today, I have a semi-good reason. Which brings me to then downtime....

A couple of days ago, "wallofvoodoo" (WOV)- my firewall server, had a few patches to install which I did. I rebooted the machine, went up stairs to make a sandwich, came back to the dungeon, and WOV was in a reboot loop (For the curious, it was ISA 2006 SP1 that made me reboot).

WOV has been my faithful firewall server for the past 7 years. Same hardware - just updating the software. When the machine started out, I had 4 Seagate 8 gig SCSI hard drives in a RAID 5 array running that system. Over the years the drives have begun failing until I was down to the final drive.

Final Config - Dual 400mhz CPUS, 768 megs of RAM, single 8 gig SCSI drive running ISA 2006 Enterprise

The final drive went south on me after 7+ years of near 24x7 operation so I decided to retire the hardware and build a new ISA box. I actually had a server running Win2003 R2 sitting idle so I patched it up, tossed on ISA 2006 +SP1 and then spent a significant amount of time importing config info from the original server and making tweaks to tighten things up. Funny thing is that this server has a relatively new 2.4ghz CPU/MoBo combo but the drives are pretty old in the grand scheme of things. It has a 60 gig and an 80 gig drive in it. I am using the 60 gig drive as then ISA cache drive since the cache tops out at 64 gigs. I expect these drives to go south relatively quickly so I am backing the machine up a little more frequently than normal.

Anyway....

After the downtime was resolved, my home LAN re-configured, a dozen devices re-IP'd, and some other misc cleanup, I realized I had not posted for the day. Only there wasn't time because of....

Fun.

My wife and I went over to the Chateau St. Michelle winery tonight and saw Chris Isaak in concert. We had never seen him before but I had heard from people who had that it was a great show. He did not disappoint. I especially liked his mirrored suit he wore for the encore.

So here I am, barely making it under the deadline wire to get my weak post in for the day about nothing particularly helpful or exciting.

What did you do today/tonight?

Cheers!