Saturday
It's a beautiful sunny day. The wedding is only a couple of weeks away, and I was going to spend the day relaxing, spending time with Jacinta, doing some invoicing, completing my personal and business tax, documenting processes, and generally having a pretty easy time.

However, I wake up this morning and find a lovely e-mail in my mailbox from Nagios, which keeps me sane as a sysadmin. It kindly informs me that one of the drives in our primary server has died, and the RAID that it's a member of is now limping. It's even one of the new drives, only 2 months of running time on it, which seagate sent me as part of a warranty return. Looks like it will go back as well.

Zipped over to the hardware store, grabbed two new drives (one to act as a failover), tested last set of backups, which in a worst case scenario will bring us up to current data as of 4am this morning. Performing a fresh set of backups as well. I don't know if it's possible to have too many backups.

Will be bringing the machine down shortly and transferring the contents to its new case (purchased a little while ago, and stuffed full of fans). Shall bring it back up, test everything is working (or in the case of the RAID, limping), add in the new drive, and wait for reconstruction.

I learnt last time the importance of separating important and unimportant data. If everything goes wrong I can restore all our important files from tape within about 2 hours. The unimportant ones take longer, but they can restore while the system is operating.

Rabbit
Rabbit seems to have forgotten his litter training. He's not using his litter tray, which is resulting in unfortunate accidents. I don't know if he means to be rude, but sometimes he is. We'll need to spent a bit of time reminding him about his litter tray and how much he enjoys using it.

I suspect it may be an attention thing. We always used to praise him for using the tray. Now we're a bit more busy I don't think we notice as much.