Diary of a Network Geek

No, this is not one of my infamous religious posts.
Actually, this is a technical post. Thursday this past week started like any other. “Jim, do this, ” and “Jim, I need that” and “Hey, Jim, should this computer be smoking this way?” A standard day in the life of a stand-alone IT department. Then, things turned ugly. Every call became “Hey, Jim, is there something wrong with this network share?” And, I finally put two and two together to get five and, sadly, discovered that the Linksys EFG-120 Network Attached Storage device had curled up its toes and died.
Luckily, the important stuff is all backed up, but not everything on that drive is “important” enough to hit the limited backup we have. So, it was time for the Network Geek to go into action. I started, as always, with a reboot. Nada. Well, I thought the NAS was Windoze based, since it was a mapped drive on the crusty, old Windows NT server I’ve been limping along here, so I reboot it again. Still nothing. So, thinking at a moderate pace, I decided to try and reseat the drive in the device. One small problem: the NAS is locked and no one has a key. Luckily, a little thing like a locked door has never been more than a temporary impediment to me, so I start banging away at the lock with my LEATHERMAN Pocket Survival Tool. After a few minutes, I managed to bust the drivetray out of its slot without damaging the case and reseat the drive. Crank it up and… Still nada. Damn, I thought to myself. Gonna’ be one of those days.
So, I tell the Boss about it. Boss says, do what you can and let me know. Great. I try getting the drive into an external drive case and hooking it up to his firewire hub on his Mac. Can you guess what we got? Yeah, nada. Right, well, I’m not ready to give up because, well, I’m a tad obsessive about this kind of thing. Sure, that makes me a little hard to deal with in the World, but in my job, obsession is definately a trait to be desired.
Next, I try hooking it up to my machine and seeing if Windows 2000 can see the partition and fix what’s wrong. What’d I get? Nunca nada. Not done, yet, though. I dig out a copy of PartitionMagic. I make the disks and boot into that freaky, specialized operating environment to see if I could fix the broken disk partition. See, I’m figuring that it’s just the File Allocation Table that’s decided to take a vacation. PartitionMagic is totally scoop at restoring those kinds of things, which is why I gave it a whirl. Sadly, nada. Well, not quite nada, since I was at least able to see that the damaged partition seemed to be a Linux partition of some kind. AhHa!
So, now, I install the drive into a Linux machine I keep under my desk, just in case of emergencies. I duck in and tell the Boss what I have in mind. He gives me a funny look and says,”Well, that’s a bit of a Hail Mary, isn’t it?” Well, yeah, it was, but isn’t that what I get paid for? To come up with and implement “Hail Marys”? And, if it works, who cares what crazy thing I have to do? Anyway, after the update to the Boss, it was off to the Linux machine to attempt a partition recovery, the hard way. Whoops! I had forgotten I canablized the drive in that machine to fix another problem weeks ago! Damn. So, I install Ubuntu on it, mainly because I have the ISO downloaded and can quickly burn an install CD. Well, Ubuntu goes to the Internet to find an archive server to download the install files, so that takes all night. Still, I figured, I’d come in early and bang this out in no time. Well, my head-shrink says I live in fantasy too much, so, it shouldn’t surprise my readers to know that it was far from easy. For an hour Friday morning, I ran every disk repair or recovery program I could find that came with a standard install of Linux. Guess what I got? Yeah, bubkes. (That’s Yiddish for nada.)
So, after all that, I still ended up formatting the drive and letting the restore run. Oh, did I mention that it was a Maxtor? For you non-geeks reading this, Maxtor 80 Gig drives have the highest fail-rate I’ve ever seen in the field. Everyone has problems with them. Well, this was a Maxtor 120 Gig drive, but I’m afraid that the same luck holds true to them, too.
Hmm, sounds like it’s time to order that new server I’ve been asking for, doesn’t it?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
A real hero is someone who's afraid, but does the right thing anyway.

No, not at the house, thankfully.
I’ve already lost one drive at the house in recent months, but this was at my webhost. I wonder if they were using one of those crappy Maxtor 80 gig drives, too? Well, anyway, the crash wiped any changes made to the blog after about 9:00am Wednesday morning, so I lost Thursday’s post and comments. And, actually, I lost the comments from Wednesday and Friday, too, but I can recreate them from e-mail. So, I’ll be doing that, but they’ll have today’s date on them. Ah, well, better than nothing, I guess.
I have to admit, I was pretty annoyed when I figured that out last night after the server finally came back up. No warning, either, because it was a disk going bad and a sudden kind of “maintenance” More’s the pity, since I had a post queued for yesterday that was lost in the data burp. And, too, at least one module required by the plugin that generates the graphic text I use for my titles needs to be reinstalled. So, until that gets done, please excuse the less than spectacular titles.

Oh, what was that old post? Well, in short, it was an explanation of why I moderate comments. Honestly, I let most comments through, but I do block the gratuitous spam that my blogs get on a regular basis. And, I block comments from the frankly rude, inappropriate people who feel the need to try and force their views on me. Understandably, they are upset and confused as to why I don’t allow their comments through, but I try to make allowances for their little minds. Still, the communicator in me has the unnatural urge to explain, so, I’ll write it again, only this time, I’ll use small words so they understand. If these “people” want to play at being foul-mouthed, petty, whiners, they can pay to have their own forum to express their insignificant ideas, but I see no reason to pay for some chowder-head to express their nasty, negative delusions about me, or the world in general, on my own blog. Clear enough?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
   --Ernest Hemingway