I left work about 3pm, I was so tired, I felt like I was going to fall asleep, and I couldn't concentrate, so there was no point me being there.

I went to the wholesaler on the way home, and I bought a network card for the guy I'd been on the phone to a couple of times.

I went home, and I pulled into the bike place to confirm the part the guy thought I was after.

When he showed me the diagram, it was nothing like what I was after.

They had a 650 there, so we went out, and I showed the guy the part I was talking about.

We went back in, and the guy looked, that part is not available as a spare, just as I suspected, as it's welded to the exhaust. Half the exhaust is required in order to get that part, and it costs $730 something.

I've got bugger all chance of getting that out of the chick.

The guy suggested I try some wreckers, which is probably a good idea, I've had a bit of luck with that before, when I found a replacement swingarm for my 250.

I ordered a new lens, to replace the scratched one with the hole in it.

I took off, and I went around to visit the guy in the electronics place where I put the aerial up on the roof last year, before it had to be taken down.

I had a conversation with the guy for a short while, and then I went home.

I called up the colo guy, to see when he was going to be taking the machine to the colo, I spoke to his wife, since he wasn't in there.

He had left to take the machine in, so I said that was what I was after confirming.

I grabbed the colo keys, a power cable, network cable, and my Debian cd, and I took off.

I went to the colo, and looked at the machine.

It's got red hat on it, no cdrom drive. D'oh.

I found a couple of floppy disks hanging around, and booted up my laptop that lives in my rack, to download the rescue/root disks, and bootstrap the install.

After mucking around for about 20 minutes, I discovered the floppy drive in my laptop appears to be stuffed.

I don't have floppy drives in any of my servers, but I do have root access to the machine I'm about to install, and it has a floppy drive.

I backed up the floppy disks I was going to use, and then found a network issue between the server and the laptop.

I moved the network connection, and worked around that.

I booted the install, and then the root disk, but it didn't detect the network card in the machine. d'oh, I'll need the 4 driver floppies, and I don't have a floppy drive with network access now.

I tried forcing in the modules from the red hat install on the hard drive, but that install was using kernel 2.4, and the install floppy had kernel 2.2 on it, somehow I doubt I will be able to force a 2.4 module into a 2.2 kernel (but I tried anyway :-)

I rebooted, and booted the machine back into red hat, to at least work out what the network card is. a 3c59x.

I'd now been in the colo for an hour, and achieved nothing.

I almost brought a spare cdrom with me. d'oh.

I decided to pinch the cdrom drive out of one of the machines in here.

I went around, pulled the machine out, carefully unplugged the drive, the machine kept running, I unscrewed it, and pulled it out of the machine.

I installed the drive in the new machine, booted the cd up, did a basic install, configured it, installed ssh, tested it, and then I went home.

I had a conversation with my parents for a while, and then I came out.

I dist upgraded the install, put on mysql, and freeradius, and configured and tested freeradius.

I stuck webmin on, configured it, and then decided to finish it later.

I went to bed about 11.30pm