Hello,

Thursday was a nightmare. This week could get no worse. I came home from work, where we were still offline at the sattelite office, and I found that my Linux box blew the root hard drive. OK, I understand that these things happen, but this is the SECOND used drive to go for me in as many months. I had just rebuilt the main drive, and just have to wonder what gremlin I had running around my boxen. Clearly, this was not an impressive moment.

As in the lasttime, however, I had the backups all ready and set to go, both on the online fourth hard drive in the computer, and on DVD. The repair, from installing the hard drive, to getting most of the server back up and running, was a smooth 4 hours. The first hour was re-installing RedHat 9, and then the rest of the time was untaring the archives, and setting the partitions correctly.

Someone forgot to record the partition order, and when I repaired /etc/fstab, I got all my partition labels goofed up. That's ok. Just had to use FDISK to view the partitions, and get them all properly aligned. Was able to do that rather quickly.

But there were a couple things that I did not elect to restore from tar... and that was /usr. I did not do this because I didn't backup /lib, and I did not want to have a mismatch of libraries and executables. So, that means that I lost my netatalk 3.0 installation. But that is where good documentation comes in handy, resulting in a nice sweet migration to restore the server.

Some may ask, "why didn't you just back up the whole thing?" Because I haven't found a way to get tar to ignore certain folders properly. I do not want to create a recursive condition that the tar program tries to archive the archive! So I do it in sections, and until I installed a mongo drive, I didn't have the space to backup everything. The important stuff -- the data -- was saved just fine, along with the MySQL materials.

Moral of story: backup your data. Now. Do it. My life was saved because I had my data in 3 locations: the orig set, the set on the backup hard drive, and a set on DVD. It took me a few hours to restore... yes... but if I had to re-create the data, that could take weeks.

So, now my Linux server is again happy. 2 IDE hard drives. 1 CD-ROM. 1 SCSI RAID 5. 4 network interfaces. And one scroll mouse.

Time for me to go and play some chess.

ARF