provisionally, we are back up

Charybdis seems to be up and functioning, thanks in no small degree to the wonderful Symond/Bruce (whose house houses the server) who put in alot of his weekend running tests and replacing piece of hardware after piece of hardware. Joel determined that the fan failure killed every piece of hardware in that server except a) the case and b) one of the harddrives. Thank goodness for that! The two drives are set up in a raid, and so the failure of one means all the data is (theoretically) secure on the other. We did loose a little bit of data, but for me, it was just one folder which I hadn't accessed in months, and so he was able to restore whole-scale from an old back-up.

So, we're up, we're running, my email works, my webpages are available, and it will hopefully stay this way.

so much for that idea

The plan for today was to head out to the office, make some photocopies, run to the close library to return a few books and pick up some that are on hold, do a few more things, and then eventually head up to the Singel library to spend the day there finishing up my Anselm paper and immersing myself in the names of VOC ships from the early 17th century. Well, the fact that we didn't get the usual Monday morning email announcing tea and cookies at 11am should've tipped me off, but it wasn't until I got out to the office and found it completely closed that I had a vague recollection of hearing something about today...

Yup, we've got another religious holiday on our hands here. Happy Whitmonday, everyone! I thought celebration of this holiday had gone out with the Middle Ages. (I also thought of it as something peculiarly Catholic, but it's not one Joel was familiar with.)

So I guess I'll have to stick around at home and finish up my Anselm paper and immerse myself in the names of aliens in the 1593 return of strangers in London.

when I said 'provisionally', I meant it

Things ran fine overnight, but a little bit before I left for the office, my ssh session into charybdis got kicked out. Now occassionally, Symond's DSL flakes out, and we're done for an hour or two, so I figured that's what happened. No such luck. The new RAM runs extra-special-fast, and it overheated. With all due luck, we'll finally be running again around about the time that I'm heading off to bed - but that means all you guys back in the States chomping to get at my articles will have another good 7 hours of use before the day is over.

Hopefully. Between not having access to any of my articles, or being able to go to the library, I got surprising little of what I'd planned to do today done.