A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
July 29
Recovering DSPsrv, day 1.
Of all things not to have: a power cord. The only kettle lead I
had lying around had a right-angle plug on it that won't fit into
the Dell PSU (for the DSPsrv is a Dell rackmount yokey) so I had
to go and buy one. I used have enough of those bloody
things to build a hammock.
Next step was to boot the thing up, which required figuring out
where I had a combination of network, power, and a display. Turns
out that in the current incarnation of Chez Waider, that means
using a 55" plasma screen as my VGA monitor... running in
text mode. Biggest VT100 I've ever used, except maybe that time I
was mucking about with a projector...
I used System Rescue CD to boot it, and then went about trying to
figure out what exact state the drives were in, and maybe image
them if I could. Eventually I gave up on the imaging option, since
it seems they're carefully tucked in behind a RAID controller and
don't show up as raw devices on the system; some poking around
with arcconf revealed that one drive had failed outright
after the array was already in a degraded state, which would
account for the current complete failure of the array to do
anything useful. I swapped in one of the replacement drives and
tried to get the system to rebuild the array (on the off chance it
might actually work). I couldn't persuade arcconf to help here, so
wound up rebooting (back to my epic console) and using the BIOS
utility.
Which gave me the reassuring message, "Container Status:
DEAD". Well, that's the "easy" recovery option out,
then.
Rebuilt the RAID array using three of the four disks (after
replacing the dead drive with a refurb) with the intention of
having the fourth one as a hot spare to prevent this sort of
silliness in future. This means the disk space reduces from 100GB
to 67GB, however, which may be an issue. Yes yes bigger disks
whatever. I may just redo the array as it was, restore, and be
more diligent about backups.
July 27
And the DSPsrv.com box has finally made it to Chez Waider. I'll
probably get around to doing something with it over the next week,
as noted.
July 22
DSPsrv.com box finally got to my office today. I have some time
off next week so I'll see about rebuilding it then.
July 21
Just added Razor support to my spam filter, as I was a bit
puzzled as to why it was performing more and more poorly. Seems I
had this installed on the old mailserver and not on the new
one. We shall see if this improves things; certainly I'd
configured the old server to be pretty aggressive with things that
Razor showed as likely spam.
July 17
Who the hell recommended Chef to me? Because it is
awesome. It is Jon Favreau doing exactly the sort of
stuff that made people say, "Hey, have you seen that movie
Swingers? Why not?". So, if you liked
Swingers, you need to see this. If you have no idea about
Swingers, you need to see this anyway.
(If you didn't like Swingers, you are not money, and you
know it. VEGAS, BABY! VEGAS!)
July 11
I saw about half of Safe House somewhere - on a plane,
maybe - but since it was the second half I'd seen before, I didn't
realise until I'd already spent an hour watching this. It's a
fairly mundane by-the-numbers thriller, nothing terrible and
nothing outstanding - although the "Rookie loses
Professional, then mystically reacquires him" stretched
credibility more than a little. Bubblegum for the brain; don't
think too hard about it.
Playing around with Elastic Beanstalk again.
July 7
DSPsrv.com update: still haven't retrieved the
server.
July 4
Lincoln was pretty good (especially
Tommy Lee Jones' character), but I couldn't help feeling like it
could have equally well been called The Thirteenth
Amendment and not have lost anything. Pretty much nothing
about his background, nothing about his first term in office,
other than some exposition mainly by Lincoln himself when talking
to others.
July 1
Installed all the shiny new from Apple (well, plus
mDNSResponder, which is sort of the shiny new old). Tried out
Apple Music. First thing I clicked on crashed the app, second
thing I clicked on (after restarting) gave me an error indicating
that it couldn't do whatever I was asking. QUALITY.
The Server upgrade, at least, appears to have worked more
smoothly; my webapps, such as they are, are still alive, which is
the thing that usually gets destroyed.