💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 439 captured on 2023-11-14 at 09:11:25. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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A curse has fallen upon my home server, and the hard drive has bad sectors. I have good backups, but the replacement drive won't arrive until Thursday, and I won't have time to install it until Saturday, probably. This is extremely vexing, because not only are my web and Gemini servers hosted on that machine, so is my email, my Matrix homeserver, and my XMPP server, which mean that I have basically no social contacts until I get the server back up and running. Except here at the pub, I suppose.
Bartender, a Macallan tonight, I think.
Oh god let me tell you about that time I was an idiot.
Okay, one of those times, the one that involves hard drive failures.
So many years ago, shortly after I'd moved to a new apartment, one of my hard drives failed. I had all my music, photos and whatnot on it, along with my address book, IRC logs, configs and so on. Fortunately, it was in a nice RAID-1 array, precisely because I didn't want to be cut off from the world before I got a new drive, and I had backups, so I was safe. I ordered a new drive and installed it a few days later.
Hardly a month goes by that the other drive fails. Just my luck, thank God they didn't both die at the same time. Out with the old, in with the new...
...six weeks later, one of the new hard drives dies.
At this point I'm pretty perplexed. I mean yes the build quality of all things computer-related has been steadily going down for a long time now but I definitely didn't get the memo about hard drives being so bad.
I pondered it for a few days and it hit me while I was idly playing my bass guitar one lazy afternoon.
My bass combo, with that big-ass speaker and, consequently, that big-ass speaker magnet, was right near the computer.
This is the reason I switched over to a VPS for now. I don't have the cash to buy a big set of hard drives for something like RAID, so I pay a little bit each month to avoid any potential disasters I could cause in my own home.
Not to mention that automatic backup images of my server are very handy to have around, given that I have a history of experimenting too much and needing a clean wipe to start over.
My self-hosting issues usually stem from random outages of my crappy Frontier DSL internet. LOL
That sucks. Hopefully there aren't any shipping delays and your replacement doesn't prove defective.