blog.species5618.net

Following on the shocking revelation as to how much my toys were costing me to run
I spent satuday morning, moving data, re-writing backup scripts, and have managed to SQEEZE all my data onto the disks in the server, which has enabled me to shut down the extreemly power hungry FC storage array.
This has also left me short of space, but a USB2 external disk is on the cards for the general archive stuff !

Next will be replace the UPS. i have a belkin 600VA one lying around, that shoudl be enough now i have reduce the power to under 200 Watts

got my self one of those domestic power meters and been around the house,

HOLY FUCK !!!!

Need to change my storage strategy, the Compaq RA4100 fibre channel chassis with 12 disk may well be over kill, but it is also DAMN expensive to run,
and I have NO idea why the UPS is pulling 100Watts with NO load !!!

??As i am only ising the storage for archive type stuff not “live” apps, I am planning to replce it with an external USB2 disk,
the Cost Recovery Period will be less than 4 months !

Not sure what to do about the server though, it is runnign AD, Exchange, VMware server with VOIP PBX and dansguardian ….

Well the UK has been hit by severe rainfalls again, resulting in massive flooding and a few unfortunate accidents

my cosy little home normally manages to escape the raging torrents of flood water. this time i get taken out by an indirect event. Between 19:25 and 20:30 last night most of Abbeymead in gloucester has no power. My UPS stayed up for 35 mins and then gave up, my friends UPS , (where my main internet connection comes in) lasted 45 minutes and then shut everything down !

so along come the power and everything starts to boot back up, when the firewall goes, kernal panic follwed by bad sector and then just to finish it off disk I/O error, and never worked again.
Out of all the things on my rather large home network to fail, it would the box with no regular backups or hot spare
Some mild panic ensued as all my SMTP emails and a few??business associates??fallback SMTP goes via this firewall !!!!!!!!!!!!

The firewall was, note the past tense, running smoothwall corp 3, with smoothhost , rule and guardian modules
corp 3 is over 3 years old, do i still have the media, do i have the licence key, do we have a spare HDD.

Fortunatly my slight over zealous, dont delete anything nature plumped up the software images, and the licence key
My friend the fitted a new hard disk, and installed the basic firewall software and connected it to our green network,

Then comes the fun part, re-config the beast, so working between trying to get the kids ready for school this morning, i managed to re-key all of the PAT and NAT forwarding rules , phew,

??NOTE to self for future reference, ??GHOST the disk , just in case