Month: March 2007

So, I may have been a little optimistic. It seems the confuser was having a little joke: working fine when upstairs but falling over as soon as it was put back in the cellar; even if you ran it’s power from the same upstairs socket. I put that in the past tense; I sincerely hope that’s not another manifestation of optimism as I have spent the last two nights (till 3:30am last night; till half one tonight) installing a new motherboard and getting the system to boot without having to re-install linux. I finally got it to do that (after initially getting kernel panics at the probe-ide stage) by going back a patchlevel or two with the kernel.

I got quite used to Ubuntu while sorting it all out; it’s dead handy just to be able to run it off the CD. I was quite tempted to install it, but that desktop would be wasted on the cellar. Maybe I’ll move to Debian, if I can find the energy.

Anyway, bedward. Tomorrow, I’ll put it back in the cellar and invoke all seven circles of superstition.

I felt this entry should be introduced with a shot of a turnip and here it is, as demonstrated by my beautiful assistant. A turnip at which, incidentally, our wee daughter turned up her nose. It’s a sad fact that Lola has quite gone off her vegetables and, while it’s easy to get her to wolf down bucket-loads of sweet, gloopy porridgey stuff at breakfast time, it’s very hard to get her past four spoonfuls of savoury thing at dinner.

Anyway, the computer has now stayed up all night (s’been up nearly 10 hours) which, given it wouldn’t get past 30m before, is pretty positive. The annoying thing is: I haven’t done anything except bring it upstairs. Is it just going to fail again when I take it back down? Is it just that manhandling it upstairs has caused something to re-seat? Well, we’ll see I guess; I’ll put off changing the motherboard for now.

I have got it reconfigured, though, so that this site and all my others are served from the internal network via port-forwarding from the gateway box, which is a step forward from running the webserver on the firewall. It’s not quite the 3-NIC DMZ setup I fancy but, frankly, there are only so many hours and most of them are filled, quite rightly, with Lola.

Anyway, it’s off to make Lola a pea risotto next. Making her dinner early as we’re off to Daphne’s 60th birthday party this afternoon and want to have Lola’s dinner ready straight away when we get back. Then there’s the blind to put up, the logs in the garden (I’ve done some *significant* pruning of our apple tree) to cut, a bit of shopping to do. Not to mention some retrospective blogging.

Computer is back up — whether it will stay up overnight is something else.

And whether it will survive back in the cellar is yet another thing.

But, for now: kip.