SwitchBL8’s gebazel

Last Wednesday my arbo-arts (the doctor that basically is hired by your employer to see to it that you don’t fake your illness) decided that I could be working 50% of my time again. From 0 to 50% in just a consult of 30 minutes. Tops. He looked at me, talked to me (but did not listen), did some tests (which I specifically asked him not to do because it really hurts me but he did not listen) and decided it was time for 50%. Doing 4 hours a day at home seems to be not a big problem. When I’m in pain, I can lay down, or do some excercises. Go for a walk. Basically anything other then sitting behind the computer. Working at home means I don’t have to drive to work, driving seems to worsen the pain. Thursday I went to work, and did my thing. Since Friday I am home again. This weekend I had more pain than before. Today the pain is almost back to normal, so we’ll see what I can do tomorrow. Going to work means about an hour drive, working 4 hours without the opportunity to lay down or so, and drive back home again. This is supposed to be good for me, the arbo-arts judged. An arbo-arts is like a GP, not a specialist of any kind. But obviously he thinks he knows best….

Open-e is giving away a lite version of their Open-e DSS software. The lite version goes to 2TB (terrabyte) of diskspace, whereas the paid version (€995) will allow you to have 16TB. There is only one “but”: the promotion only lasts until the 31st of January. So get it now!

Last Friday the server was dead. I didn’t notice until Thunderbird began complaining that the server could not be reached. It is right under my desk, and it was still “running” so I switched on the monitor. Nothing. I tried to login remotely: nothing. So I did a hard reset. That worked. Up until the booting proces started, since that showed me the message “Error loading operating system”. Fortunately, the bootsector is on disk A, the bootdisk is B and the datadisk is C. Starting a live-CD and creating a bootsector on disk B should do the trick.

Just to be sure (perhaps more than one disk was broken and I needed to reinstall the OS) I downloaded the latest Ubuntu ISO and burnt it on CD. I restarted the server, and quick enough found out that only the disk with the bootsector had died. That disc was a reminiscent from the old Windows installation that died (could not start Windows because of a corrupt registry or whatever) some time ago.

What I did was: delete the disk from the devices list (/boot/grub/devices.map), modify grub’s menu.lst (/boot/grub/menu.lst) to use the correct devices (hd1 was hd0 now), ran grub-install and rebooted the system. Voila. Everything was back in working order.

I realized in the process that certain parts of the bootdisk are never backupped. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?