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.

Clients
I don't normally complain about my clients in my diary, and I need to be pretty darn cross to even consider it, but some of today's experiences really go above and beyond what I feel is reasonable behaviour.

I swear that some of my clients must have their masters degrees in "Ignoring Good Advice". When I write very clearly that they must do either "A" or "B" or their ill-planned and expensive project will die horribly, and the client doesn't understand "A", I fully expect them to execute "B", which they *do* understand.

Instead, they ignore the problem entirely. "Works inside the office, it must work for the rest of the world." I've never felt so close to being inside a Dilbert cartoon until now.

Given that the management of this particular project decided to commit minimal resources, no testing, and release the project before it was even close to being complete, for once I'm not that regretful if it all falls over and dies.

Fun, excitement, adventure!
Yes, I'm finally doing my tax. I get to fill out the main section, a supplimentary section, and a supplimental to the supplimentary section. Oh yes, I also get a number of tax rulings to peruse on various topics. Hurrah.

Despite this, the whole thing looks surprisingly straightforward, probably because I have GnuCash measuring all the relevant details and I just need to copy out the totals of the various ledgers.

From my current estimates, I'll get a return of about $500. No big deal there, except that it means that I've overpaid my tax again. This is a good thing, because it means the tax office judges me a responsible taxpayer, and consequently they're fine with me paying tax when I see fit, rather than having to pay a portion on my income every quarter; provided that the tax gets paid, of course.

The end result of this is that I get to keep the rather sizeable sum that would normally go to the tax department, and float it in an account instead where it can earn interest. Then at the end of the financial year, I give the tax office, and pay extra tax on the interest from the float. Good for me, good for the tax office.

Work
Insane. Not only are work and the wedding competing for time, but we're trying to move the business into a stage where it can be managed by others while Jacinta and myself are absent on honeymoon. Ian's agreed to cover most of the fire-fighting and sysadmin side of things, and Lizy will be handling course bookings and administration.

Perl
Perl 5.8.1 has just been released. This is actually a special release for me, since there's a little bit of me in the newer NEXT module that comes with it.

Hardware
Hardware sucks. Got some spangly new graphics card that's supposed to run like the wind, but it doesn't want to work with the old mobo. Fine, muck around with hardware, put it into the new mobo (which will eventually go into one of our servers) and it works. Good. It's got a DVI output, and we have LCD screens. Plug the two together, and I find a flickering bunch of crud with edge effects everywhere. About to try it using the standard VGA connectors, but I thought DVI was supposed to give you a clearer picture, not a cruddier one.

Dance Games
Are lots of fun, and make a surprisingly good workout.

Wedding
Is still happening, and requires far too much organisation.

Staff
Usually I try to avoid poaching from my clients, as taking their good staff members doesn't always make them happy. However I have one client who's offered to introduce me to some of their eligible and clueful staff members for poaching, no doubt to free up more of my own time to work for them. I really am honoured, and think that it's a very strange world that we work in.

Upstream proxies
Are running dead-slow tonight. Thank-goodness I can turn them off.