What goes around comes around
An entirely wasted fucking day. And it’s all my fault.
Back in January a guy broungt me his dead PC to resurrect. The hard drive had developed bad sectors right in the middle of some key files Win98 needs to boot. I advised him of his options and he decided to get another PC.
I got him a PC, set it up, delivered and installed it and billed him. We had talked before about putting his old PC to the curb, I wanted to confirm before doing this. He said he’d think about it and get back to me.
Three weeks later I hadn’t heard. So, just for grins, I reformatted ant tested the old drive. It tested out just fine. Heckle’s original 13.5 gig drive whined like a jet engine. This 8 gig one was pretty quiet, so I swapped it.
A few days later he said he wanted to give his old boat anchor to a kid. I gave it back to him sans hard drive saying I’d trashed it. The noisy drive I removed from Heckle is one of the things that went to the garage sale last week.
That drive ran just fine in Heckle until this morning. It died in the middle of downloading the daily backups from the production server. I hadn’t backed up the work I’d done last night and I was was really anxious to get continue on it today. I have only a week to get a proposal and demo site done for a potential client.
Since the drive had run fine until it warmed up, I stuck it in the fridge for an hour. When I put it back in Heckle, it fired up just fine. I copied off what I needed and shut it down.
I located a used drive at a shop walking distance from here. I paid $32 for an old 20 gig Maxtor.
I toyed around with whether I should hand-install everything on the “new” drive or just restore the image I’d made last Friday and freshen it with the files I’d pulled off the old ont this morning.
The reason I toyed with it was that teh new server runs Apache 2. Heckle runs Apache 1.27. And I like to wipe and reload my PCs once a year anyway, and that’s coming up next month for Heckle.
So I spent a few hours this afternoon trying to get Apache 2 to run on Wretched Excess. I ran just fine. Served up pages like the Dickens. But somehow I muffed the virtual hosting settings settings. Of the dozon or so web sites I run locally, it would serve only one page of one site no matter what I did.
Okay, save that for another day. Restore the image and be done with it.
Naturally what should have been a simple, ten minute process fought me tooth and nail, every step of the way. Two hours later, Heckle is running just fine from the “new” disk.
In all, I lost twelve hours so far today. It’ll probably be a total loss before everything’s through.
I’ve thought about lying to that customer all day. In the long run, he wasn’t hurt because he wasn’t likely to get any more service out of that drive than I was.
Still, I lied and it cost me a whole day of work. Heh. And I had to buy a hard drive since I’d sold that jet turbine one just two weeks ago… for ten bucks.
