Friday, November 11, 2005

less than perfect equanimity

K2, our mail server, is now down. It appears to be a memory problem. It could be as simple as a loose SIMM or video card, or as bad as a blown chip. Unfortunately, the server is about 9 hours' drive from here, depending on traffic. Net result: we just spent an hour reconfiguring mail clients to patch together functioning e-mail systems, and a lot of archived mail is sitting on k2's disks where we can't get to it until that machine and I spend a few quality hours one-on-one.

Everest, my backup desktop machine, is also down. The symptoms suggest a blown power supply, but I don't have time to work on it right now. I'm also a little afraid to open it, because when a power supply blows it can take a lot of expensive stuff with it. Net result: if the new laptop croaks, I'm in deep doo-doo.

The old laptop, Mt. Terror, is sitting in the same city as K2, the same 9 hours away, so there's no good way to press it into service as a mail server.

Two dead computers and one seriously wounded in the space of a month. It's probably just lack of time to work on them, since ordinarily I'd be able to focus on getting them up and running, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm losing my touch...

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