I've been gone a while. My dad went into the hospital and, by all accounts, he nearly died. I'm not going to say anything else about this occurence other than I had a severely unpleasant week, and I've been lax on my side projects. (I know how that must sound, but I say one man's shallow is another man's escapism. Anyone else who mostly unsuccessfully attempts to fill the shoes of an arthritic father with a fatal heart condition whose daily job is to take care of a 25-year-old quadriplegic can cast the first stone when I say I have a growing list of things I want to think about other than what I did last week.)

Anyway, moving on...

My first mind-duller was getting the new fileserver working. See, the machine had nearly-new IBM Deskstars in it: a 20GB for the OS and two 40GB drives setup as a RAID1 pair for our network-shared data (MP3s/images/etc. over Samba and NFS, some web-based stuff). The machine worked great until two of the drives started doing that "click-of-death" thing that you hear about from IBM "Deathstars" lately. Mine had the clicking sound, plus a very faint scratching noise in one of the RAID drives. It got to the point that I couldn't write files to slowly larger number of directories and I'd have to manually fsck (with ext3 partitions, no less) on each reboot. My fileserver needed a lung transplant.

Fry's had this sale on 80GB 7200RPM Western Digital hard drives for $149. I bought two a couple days before I left for PHX. I had a mostly new 15GB Seagate drive from my old fileserver that I used for the OS. I put the two 80GB drives in, threw in the Red Hat 7.3 CD, and went to town. I'd never made a software RAID array from the install before. Oddly, it's easier to do it manually after the install. But after seeing how easy it is to recover from having two disks fail and how simple it is to set up and manage a mirrored RAID array, I'm nearly positive that from now on I'll always pay the extra cash for a duplicate drive. It's really cheap insurance, and I figure 80GB ought to last a couple years.

It's not like the 40GB I used to haev wouldn't have been fine, though. I'd have loved to keep using what I had. I've always had good luck with IBM drives. I guess I figured that since they invented the hard drive, they ought to know what they are doing. But the 60/70GXP Deskstar line is just not fit for normal use. But since IBM has essentially sold their hard disk unit to Hitachi, then the point on what I'll buy in the future is moot.

My second timewaster is getting Transgaming's WineX. I wanted to play a game. I couldn't find the second Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault cd, so I decided to install Jedi Knight 2. And then I remembered that I don't have that CD either. I did remember that I made a copy of it in the form of an ISO image on my newfangled RAID storage area, however, and that I could just burn a new copy. And then it occurred to me that there wouldn't be any point in wasting a CDR since I could just mount the ISO image locally where my CD-ROM normally gets mounted and install from there:

[wee@lazlo src]$ cd /mnt/acosta/cdr-temp
[wee@lazlo cdr-temp]$ sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop ./jediknight2.iso /mnt/cdrom
[wee@lazlo cdr-temp]$ winex /mnt/cdrom/Setup.exe
[wee@lazlo cdr-temp]$ sudo umount --force /mnt/cdrom/
[wee@lazlo cdr-temp]$ cd ~/TransGaming_Drive/Program Files/LucasArts/Star\ Wars\ JK\ II\ Jedi\ Outcast
[wee@lazlo Star Wars JK II Jedi Outcast]$ winex JediOutcast.exe

And that's all there was to it. It runs like a champ.

I've got a lot more projects still. The cash register has been languishing, my Gateway webpad needs to get hooked up, my "toy machine" (the one I play with, which I can re-image if I need to without losing anything) needs to be put back together, and I have to get another disk for my laptop so I can take it to work. And as Stokes pointed out last might, I have to mow the front lawn. And I have to clean out the garage at some point. And go to the paintball store to get stainless quick-disconnect air lines for my Matrix. And pick up an RHCE book. And ebay a bunch of junk that's been piling up. Probably the first thing I should do is make a list of things to do. I might even need a meta-list.