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                     JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 4TH MAY, 2022
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SUBJECT: …and there goes the server…
   DATE: Wed  4 May 19:04:40 BST 2022

Remember in my last entry when I said “Long weekend, this weekend, plenty of
time for fixes and more development…”? Me and my big mouth :(

And so it came to pass that “cube” logged off and powered down for the last
time on Sunday 1st May at 7:45pm after suffering a hard-drive failure. It will
be missed, may it rust in peace…

My trusty old router, firewall and backup server for the lab died. It wasn’t
much of a machine: dual core Celeron E1400 @ 2GHz (circa mid 2008), 2Gb RAM,
single 250Gb HDD — but it was my machine damn-it! ;(

I spent time trying to rsync 185Gb of data to another machine over my 10/100Mb
network. Due to the SATA controller resetting every few seconds it took ages.
It wasn’t until I finally powered off the machine and all was silent that I
realised how much noise it made.

I have a new 1Tb WD Green SSD ordered to replace the failed drive. Meanwhile I
needed to get the lab back online, and fast, for work. I press-ganged my 4Gb
Raspberry Pi 4 into doing router, firewall and backup duties… which has worked
out remarkably well[1]. So well in fact that I might not resuscitate “cube”
and instead keep the Pi in service. If Pi were easier to come by I could
easily swap in a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2Gb to do the job.

Needless to say, with all this going on my long weekend went “Poof!” and
disappeared. So much for getting a lot of coding done :(

It is Wednesday, WolfMUD Wednesday, and I’m off to work on some combat code…

--
Diddymus

  [1] This is the Raspberry Pi 4 running 32-bit Pi OS.


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