Unscheduled down-time

Dagnabbit! Just when you sit back and get a contented smile growing on your face at how well your network is going....BANG!!! The stinking web server throws a hard drive.
Stupid bloody computers! Thank goodness for backups though. After the last lot of down-time I made sure my backup regime was a little more robust and thankfully it's come up trumps and no data was lost :) Yay for me.

The "ye-olde" hard drive in arachnid (the server that drives GrayOnline) which was a venerable 6GB Western Digital had survived almost 7 years of service, the last 2 being on basically 24x7! Well it's now dead. Totally.

Thankfully a friend of mine had a brand new 40GB Western Digital sitting in his office still in its sealed static bag. Coz he owed me a little cash for a recent favour, we cancelled the debt and I got a new hard drive for next to nothing - thanks Rocci!!

Long story short, the new hard drive was installed, the old data restored, the boot loader configured and voila! We're back online!! The new drive has a bigger cache (2MB - the old one had 512kB) so the performance might be fractionally better now too.