kestrel

when I arrived in the study this morning, things weren’t entirely as they should be.

existing connections were ok – IRC, terminal windows, Adium. But Firefox wouldn’t connect to anything and, in my bleary state, I thought Squid was playing up. Went to check a couple of other things, and nothing …

then I realised that no DNS meant a problem with the Windows server. And indeed, when I went into the server room littlest bedroom, it was sitting there with a blue screen on its face. Aaargh.

it won’t boot in safe mode with networking. It won’t boot in safe mode at all. It claims to have an error in its NTFS file system, according to the BSOD. Oh joy. No, there’s no recovery console installed. No, it won’t repair off the CD.

so we will have to go to PCWhirled and pay their extortionate price for a new hard drive, and reinstall the server. I don’t know how many hard drives we’ve bought this year, always with an extra one to keep in stock, but we have gone through the sodding things like a knife through butter recently.

we have backups of all the data, but we don’t bother to back up the OS, so that’ll be a fun day in the workhouse. The backups are on external drives, but they’re all accessed via SMB, so I can’t get to them either.

in the middle of all this, one of the server UPSen started beeping – had blown the fuse in its plug.

good will to all men and peace on earth. But bah bloody humbug to computers.