notes-57

Tue Mar 11 21:31:00 PST 2003

In terms of computing I think I’ve learned a few things recently:

First, always make recent backups — hard drives aren’t as reliable as you may have been lead to believe. I lost my primary drive in my Linux box back in December. The one with all my digital photos, plan files, html files, CVS repositories, server config files, all that good stuff. Fortunately, some of the really important stuff I had copies sitting on my laptop, but there was a pretty darn good chunk of data that only existed on that drive, and possibly cached across the net.

If I had really had my wits about me, I would have dived into google’s cache right away. Fortunately I found the internet wayback machine http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html and was able to retrieve about 80% of my plan files from before the middle of last year.

I also took the hard drive and after detaching the existing disk and burning a linux "SuperRescue" CD got the drive to the point where it is mountable, but there are a ton of errors on it still. So I’m using scp to try and copy off what data will come off the drive and save what I can back onto pooh over the network. I’m thinking that the drive is probably just plain toast, but I’m managing to get some good data off of it from the old /public area. I tried accessing the home directories, but they appear to be a lost cause, which is really sad, since that is where a lot of the really useful data was stored. I’ve also got some older CD backups that I’ll need to mesh together with what I can recover from the drive and other sources.

On the plus side, upgrading to RH8.0 has been a fairly positive experience except for some PHP incompatibilities with both Gallery and Bookmarker. And thanks to grip and mserve (utilities to serve .mp3 files to my Rio Reciever) I’ve got my Rio sitting on top of my TV and playing lots of fun audio files over my home stereo system. I do think that I understand better why the Rio didn’t sell so well. The user interface on the box is really, really bad. So over the past week or two I’ve been putting CDs in my box and grip rips and encodes them using lame and then spits them back out. I’ve managed to get probably over 60 disks done so far without a lot of hassles. I do have a couple that may be a bit of a problem getting info on them through the freedb servers, but currently I’m almost suspecting a problem on their end.