Stolen Property
The last time I remember somebody stealing from me would have been back when I was in primary school. Sure, the odd friend may have loaned a book here and there which they forgot to return, but our house has never been burglarized, and I've never been involved in a mugging.

As such, it was to my great surprise to discover that theives have been at work on our property. Our lovely silverbeet is almost entirely gone! Someone's helped themselves to our front vegie patch, and taken the biggest and bestest of our silverbeet leaves.

If it were any other plant, I probably wouldn't have minded. We've got plenty of lettuce, heaps of broad beans, lots of peas, and rhubarb everywhere. But we only had one silverbeet plant, and it was only just reaching the stage where we were ready to pick a few leaves from it. Now it will be a long time before we can safely harvest from it, as only a few leaves are left.

Buck's Night
Some last-minute mix-ups resulted in us changing venue for the dinner, but the laser-games afterwards were very successsful and enjoyed by all. Unfortunately my team got completely owned in the two team-games. A big congrats up to both Jacinta and scottp who did an excellent job at base-defense.

Stress
My current level of stress is beginning to interfere with my ability to work effectively. Everything has to be done before the wedding, and the lack of ability of some people to do tasks to the timelines they have set for themselves has further increased my frustration.

At this point I really miss being in a regular job, where I can just take a big wad of leave to get married in a relaxing manner, and not have to worry about how everyone else will survive.

Server Move
I have one client who wishes to move a whole rack of servers tomorrow, and is doing so on the understanding that availability of support for the week immediately following the move will be at an all-time-low. I've provided my professional opinion that it's a very bad idea, but it's going ahead nonetheless.

No doubt the client will find the matter a learning experience.

Lesson of the Day
Do not mix up your faxmodem and UPS-health serial connectors. Otherwise your machine may perform an emergency shutdown whenever you receive a fax.

New Case
Machine transfer to new case went fine. Small problem of the SCSI controller not wanting to talk for a bit, solved by moving its PCI slot. The new case is both smaller and better designed. Fans sit directly in front of the drive bays, and rear and side fans help move a lot of air through the case. The result is a very cool machine, which makes me happy. Oh yeah, it's also got a clear plastic side, bright coloured LEDs, and rounded cables.

It still looks like a mess of cables inside.

Like most cases, it has plenty of bays to place things, and never enough power connectors to power them. Good thing I have plenty of splitters.

RAID
Re-inserted drive into array. Reconstruction occured quickly (2 hrs) and painlessly. No problems whatsoever. Wrote proceedures documentation on what to do in a similar situation if I'm not around, and left the spare drive in the machine to act as a failover disk, although it needs to be manually added rather than automatically.

I'd love to add some agressive drive testing to the server's normal health checks. Currently a bad sector is only found if we hit it by accident. I want to perform progressive badblock scans (on timed intervals, during periods of low-load) to find badblocks sooner rather than later.

Nagios
As part of my recreational time today, I wrote a small Nagios plugin to grab hard-drive temperatures, ambient temperature, and CPU temperature, test them for being too hot, etc. etc. I'm almost reinventing the wheel, but these things are so quick'n'easy to write that I don't mind a great deal.

Garden
Lots of harvesting from the garden today. Potatoes, peas, rhubarb, lettuce, turnips, peas and assorted fresh greens were our reward. I wish I had more time for gardening.

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.