Junk that sells
Someone is buying my dead hard-drive on eBay. In fact, there's been two people bidding on it. I wonder if it's because they've realised it's still under warantee?

Very happy that woody is stable now, since potato really was starting to show its age.

Upgrade will probably happen late this week when all the remaining bits arrive. Hate having to actually touch the hardware and deal with messy heatsink compounds and cut my thumb on sharp edge cases and all the rest of it. I'll be glad when it's finished, though.

Really wanting to move the office to its new location, which involves getting some recabling done by a person in posession of an Austel license. Awfully convenient that my future father-in-law has one of them.

My next plan is to make a big storage machine (~240Gb in a RAID-5 configuration), and hang the tape drive off that. Workstations will use the network storage whenever possible. Keeping up-to-date backups for a single machine is much more attractive than many seperate machines. I'm hoping I can do most of the set-up this weekend.

The next stage is to move the office to the 3rd bedroom (more space, better view), and put the noisy server machines in a cupboard or other out-of-the-way place. Jacinta's workstation is the noisiest machine of all, containing four fans (1 x PSU, 1 x Case, 1 x CPU, 1 x GPU) all in the space of a small shoebox. I don't know what I'll do to quieten it down.

Thanks to Ian's very wise advice, I've turned off hardware compression and I'm using software compression (gzip) instead. After Ian mentioned that he discovered the hard-way that different tape drives can use different compression algorithms, I'm very happy not to make the same mistake.