The resurrection
After almost of month of calling data recovery houses, searching on ebay, negotiating with second hand merchants from overseas, and general waiting for the post, my replacement drive arrived today.

Popped the new drive into my machine, formatted it, ran a few tests. Yup, it works.

Pulled it out, swapped the dead controller on my old drive with the controller from the new drive. Plugged it in, booted, ran fdisk. Oh my goodness, the partition table in intact. I'm so lucky.

Mount the drive. Wow, the superblock is still intact. Read the data from the drive. That's all there too.

Managed to recover every single file on the toasted drive. Very very very happy Paul. Cost, about $AU100 vs $AU1000 for professional data recovery.

Moral of the story: Keep backups of your junk drives. Just because you wouldn't put anything of value on your squid cache drive, doesn't mean that you won't (in a moment of stupidity) decide it's a good place to store your six years worth of mail archives.

Other News
I have a great new way of making money using my computer and the internet! I can work from home, set my own hours, and earn TAX-FREE income. Yes, it really does work!

No, I'm not going to tell you what it is. If everyone was doing it, then I wouldn't be able to make anywhere near as much.

Massive Filesystem Corruption
At about 10am this morning, the power supply on the main server failed. This has happened once before, and to be honest the novelty of fitting a not-quite-the-same power supply into the case was wearing a bit thin. I did it nonetheless, using an old supply from a 386 that had been hanging around just waiting to be made useful again.

With the new power-supply in place, it was discovered that only two of the three disks were responding. Hmm, very odd. Locate faulty disk, remove, check over...

Oh my. Chips on the drive controller aren't supposed to bubble like that, are they? And boy does it smell bad! That's okay, that drive was just /var, and I can live without my log files and proxy cache. After all, that's why I've made backups of the other two disks but not this one.

Except that /var contains the all-important /var/spool/mail, /var/cvs, Debian package information, and some databases. A bit of an ouch there.

It was only later that I discovered that I had my last six years worth of mail also on said hard-drive, since it had more space than the other disks. That was the crushing blow.

As it happens, the blowing power-supply also managed to cause damage to the motherboard/CPU/RAM as well, since init would segfault upon startup. Changing the Mobo/CPU/RAM fixed the problem. I'll be testing sticks of memory to see which ones can be recovered.

Moral of the story, backup everything, even the stuff you don't care about, in case there's some stuff you do care about in there as well.

It looks like the drive's controller is dead, but the platters and mechanism inside are still okay. Tried replacing the controller with a similar model from a drive that has busted insides, but to no avail. It *tries* to spin the drive up and all, but is obviously expecting something else. I think if I can find an identical controller (old-ish Qantum fireball) I should be fine. I'm hoping that one of these professional data recovery joints has a big box of them.

Chooks
RIP Boor'yall. She dropped off the perch (quite literally) Saturday morning.

Karaoke
Once again I'm amazed by some of the things that exist in the world. On Friday myself and some friends were looking for a Karaoke bar in order to do a bit of singing. We found one promising looking place and entered. The group had a couple of Japanese exchange students in it, so we wanted to find a bar that had a good multilingual selection. This place looked like it should.

Upon entering, I was very politely informed that this is the sort of bar which has "ladies to sit with you, and since you have your own ladies, there wouldn't be much point...", and "yes, it is a karaoke bar, but more of a gentleman's club karaoke bar".

We didn't stay, but we did spend a fair bit of time disbelieving the bar and wondering if it really was true.

Toy
My palm m505 arrived the other day. It's been very handy in planning and prioritizing. It's also shown me that I'm much much more busy than I thought I was previously.

Quote of the day

Excessive gambling may cause financial problems for some people.

--- Crown Casino, Melbourne

Wireless keyboard/mouse
New wireless keyboard and mouse (made by A4 tech) arrived today, and they work beautifully. I can type from another room and all works fine. Considering the purchae of another set for the second machine, since they're just so darn handy and nice to use.

Apparently each keyboard and mouse has its own serial ID, which the receiver can remember (and hence excluse all others). In theory this lets you run lots of wireless keyboards/mice side-by-side, and while syncing your keyboard to your receiver is an easy button-press, I can't quite figure out how the mouse is done without software. Even so, the units have two channels they can operate on, so a second keyboard/mouse combo should not be a huge problem.

Mackay
Spent some time in sunny Queensland (Mackay area). Took me a day to get used to the heat and humidity, but very much enjoyed myself after that. Went ocean rafting, which was a lot of fun, but I pretty much had to be dragged out of the water at snorkling time. Coral reefs are really pretty, and all the stories you've heard about swimming with schools of fish are true.

Also found the most perfect property imaginable up there. Hundreds of fruit trees, green pastures, house in perfect ocndition, permanent creek, and an amazing swimming hole. Reasonably priced, too. Trouble is, we're not really looking at moving yet, and in order to purchase and move we'd need to do a lot of employment, financial, and social juggling. I also doubt I can get a high-speed, low-latency Internet connection in the middle of nowhere. :)

Work
Lots of work to do. Never rains it pours sort of thing. That's good, because it looks like I've got a secure line of jobs lined up for the next 3-4 months. No starving here.

Investment
Having looked at the farm in Mackay sparked a big session of financial planning. Found some great investment properties in Mackay (excellent rental returns), but Mackay's property prices aren't exactly moving, and the average price of units fell a little over the last year. Mackay's a small place, so any statistics on prices there should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Looking at properties closer to Melbourne, somewhat because it's easier to get to (living in Melbourne at all), and somewhat because of the high population and property value growth.

UPS
After a bit of fiddling, the UPS finally works the way it should. Trial-and-error revealed what the functions were for the various pins on the cable provided with the unit, and genpower did the rest. Teddybear (our server) will now happily shut itself down on power failure and switch itself (and the switch and the ADSL modem) off. When power is restored, everything comes back nicely. No fscks involved.

Anyone who purchases an UpSonic Power Guardian should know that the attached cable can be treated as an "apc1-nt" by genpower. No doubt the Linux software that comes with the unit also works.