Just as I was finishing writing the last blog, Dad came in and said that dinner was ready if I wanted any.

I went in, and ate, and had a chat. I wanted to know what business stuff had been setup, so I could invoice the people I did the work for yesterday. Apparently still waiting for the ABN.

I didn't get around to dragging the RAS out to configure it (it's got everything stacked up on it in the rack). I went about building the webserver machine instead.

I put the motherboard in, the video card, and the disks. These machines are really neat and tidy, when you only have a couple of SATA disks in the machine, and it's not full of IDE cables strangling everything.

I moved the email machine out of the way, and put the webserver there. I plugged it all in.

I shutdown the accounts box, and took the IDE disk out that was hanging around in it, that I need to bootstrap the machines, so I can build the RAID array on the SATA disks, then dump all the data on, and run lilo to put the bootable MBR on the SATA disks.

I wondered if it might have been faster to pull one of the working disks out of the RAID in the routing machine (with the machine off, they don't support hot swapping), boot it up, let it realise a disk is missing, shut down again, and put one of the blank disks I intend to use in the webserver in, and have it rebuild the mirrors on the new blank disk.

I tried this. I did it a bit wrong. I tried to raidhotadd a whole disk device (/dev/hdg) to a mirron (/dev/md0), which should have been made up of /dev/hde2 and /dev/hdg2, but it didn't work it out for itself, so that was a good lesson. If a disk does fail, when I replace it, I need to partition the replacement disk first (I'll have to properly record the partitioning scheme somewhere), and then add each replacement partition to each raid device.

I put the original disk back in, booted up, oops, it didn't start up properly, it thought the disk was still missing. I had to raidhotadd all the original partitions on the second disk back into each md device, and have it rebuild each mirror. That took about an hour.

It was now after midnight, I'd been drinking for the last couple of hours, I'd finished off the Coke, I had indigestion from all the Coke.

I booted the webserver, and worked out a partitioning scheme for the disks, created the raid array, and waited for it to build all the mirrors.

I'd had enough at this point. The tv was going to crap, I'm not sitting up and watching infomercials, so I moved the phoenix programmer on to the machine with the ISDN card in it (that's not used anymore), I don't have any other windows machines, besides this one, but with the amount that Opera crashes and I have to restart it, the CPU load gets too high, and then the tv drops out (it the dodgy vb app also makes the machine really slow).

I moved the programmer, started the software up. I booted the sat box, it found it. I went and got the proper card, and installed that, mucked around getting both boxes to run off the card.

The machine isn't great. it's only a P200, and it has real issues running the software, and keeping up.

The music channels are hard to watch, because the music blips and blops everytime the key changes, because the timing has been made so close. When I went inside to eat dinner, where the proper card was in the box, I noticed it was even breaking up with the card in the box, what a joke, people are putting up with that? it must be effecting all the customers.

If I was a full paying subscriber, I would be calling up and complaining about it every single day, it's completely unacceptable.

Anyway, I watched tv for a bit, didn't do much on the PCs, and then I went to bed.

I felt a bit crook, the indigestion was really bad. I ended up going and having a bit of a spew, it was just because I was so bloated, I let out a massive burp, that Barney Gumble would have been proud of.

I went to bed about 2am in the end.