I must be really tired lately.

I turned the telly off about 1.30am this morning, and slept until after 11am this morning. I ended up getting out of bed about midday after watching a couple of episodes of the Simpsons.

I looked at the PC I left memory testing last night.. truckloads of memory issues.

I grabbed the disk out of the machine, and booted it up to test its memory again.

I put the disk into one of the servers, and booted it.

Same kernel images, so it's not just memory related, and I still couldn't use vi.

I found that I could, after removing nvi.

I started eating the box of biscuits I was going to eat for dinner last night, as lunch.

I tried to remove libncurses, so I could reinstall it, hopefully to get the kernel to configure/compile.

Oops, I then ended up with no useful binaries left. I couldn't even reboot. I reset the machine, and kicked off the install again.

Once it was installed, I wanted to do the dist-upgrade again.

I ftpd in a bunch of files until I could put ssh up, and then I scp'd all the deb packages I backed up last night back in, and updated a bunch of stuff.

I found I should also have backed up /var/lib/apt/lists or something, so I ended up having to wait a while for apt to update. Oh well, at least I've got all the debs, and they are what takes the time.

I configured the kernel, same issue.. I then found after installing a couple of packages (which I'd done before I reinstalled) it then worked. Hmm.

I was able to compile the kernel. I rebooted, and it finally found the SATA controller.

It set one of the SATA disks as / and wouldn't boot (because it was blank). I booted the old kernel, then discovered I'd been pretty smart, and compiled the driver for the hard disk as a module. Oops, how would you load a kernel module from a disk you can't access, until you load that module?

I recompiled with support built in, rebooted, and it was all go.

I even managed to get the onboard network controllers working.

Now I need to get the files installed onto the SATA disks, so I can rip the dodgy ATA disk out of the machine again.

I partitioned the SATA disks, (still need to work out how software RAID works). hdparm -t results in about 50mb/sec transfer, not too shabby.

I started running debootstrap to install on to the SATA disks, it's still downloading stuff in order to install. Why it can't just use files from the existing install I don't know.

My phone rang, it was the woman who owns/is responsible for the machines that got dropped off yesterday. She wants one of them fixed reasonably soon, I'll do it tomorrow.

My phone rang again later, it was my mate's ex girl friend who I setup the internet for a while ago.

She'd got Wide Area Calling enabled on her phone, so she could call into Sydney to avoid the bandwidth problems in Gosford, but I doubt those issues exist anymore, for the price of those VISP ports, they would want to have a bit more bandwidth behind them than when we did it.

But, as still noone has spoken to me directly, and I don't know what's going on (almost 2 weeks later) I don't know what the story is.

Dad came in before, with some paper work for registering a business, or a company or something. I really don't like the name, but apparently the business name TCPIP is gone.