On A Dying Drive

Mon, November 26, 2007 - 6:46 PM PST

So three times in the past few days, my server has complained about hard disk errors. The first time I said to myself "gee, that sucks, let's see if it happens again after a reboot". When it happened the second time, I said "well, maybe having the wireless access point sitting just above where the drive is could be causing it to overheat" so I moved it. Now it's happened for the third time and I'm just not looking forward to swapping it out. Not at all. I have backups. I have a couple other drives I could swap in. What I lack now, is motivation.

I just saw another batch of messages appear in /var/log/messages. The good news is that while it's going wonky, it does keep passing packets - that is, iptables is still doing its thing and so I can surf the web alright. The bad news is that I probably would fix it right now if the thing quit working completely... I should have taken care of it yesterday when I had time.

Bah. Meh.

Oh, something just dawned on me. The system that I used to netboot this box when I did the initial install isn't around anymore and I don't have any other PCs now. I also still don't have a CDROM drive for it. Netbooting it again could prove difficult... I keep telling myself that I hate this kind of thing, but I'm beginning to wonder if that's not true. Why else would I continue to place myself inevitably into this sort of position?