Old hardware fails, who knew?

The server's been down for a while. The hard disk decided to snap a spindle about three weeks ago. I've been hunting through my lone backup trying to find some even slightly recent files. Google and the Wayback Machine aren't much use. I've lost some updates but nothing too serious. I've set up Bacula on the network so at least the data loss won't happen again. Since I can't afford a backup server at the moment, I'm using an old laptop with an unreasonably large hard disk.

Part of the reason it's taken so long to get back online is that Bacula is complicated. I seem to have scheduled the restore job to run just before the backup job, so all my backups look identical. How did I manage to do that?
posted at 12:36am BST on 31st July 2007

New Server

I've just about finished doing a parallel upgrade of my old server hardware, which was a PC in a server tower case. Now there's a real server up there and it's about 4.5 times faster than the old one. The only slight snag is this one doesn't reboot at all. You have to turn it off and on again. A small price to pay for more power! Thanks to BTJ and Cragdor for the server.
posted at 1:34pm GMT on 4th February 2007

Server Rebooted

The server reboot went without hitch. It sounds like nothing, but I was worried the server wouldn't come back up after a reboot. Looks like my fears were groundless and I can reboot with impunity in future, hurrah! The MySQL daemon even came back up all by itself. I'm impressed.
posted at 8:55pm GMT on 5th January 2007

CAPTCHA added

More of a design note than real news: the first version of my CAPTCHA system is in place on the MiniBBS [see left]. Hopefully it'll stop the majority of the spambots, though it's very simple and might be easily crackable. We'll have to see.
posted at 2:38pm GMT on 9th December 2006

New laptop, yay!

Finally some news exciting enough to post about. A new laptop is in the production queue at Alienware UK and my name is on it! If you're interested, it's a customised Alienware Area 51 m5550 with an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. That'll reduce compile times a bit, since my current development box is a well used but decrepit Dell Latitude C600. Plus it'll serve as a portable games machine for the odd LAN party at BTJ's house. Woohoo!
posted at 5:32pm GMT on 10th November 2006

Another New Style

How's this style for minimal then? There's no layout at all. Everything's just floating in place. Close a few rollers and see the others dance.

Mmm, think I like this. Might keep this and see what happens.

Eventually I'll put it all in a database - can't have thought files cluttering the file system.
posted at 2:01am BST on 5th July 2006