What an interesting week. Not content with crashing hard drives and losing data, I went through a round of Ubuntu weirdness that meant I had to change the monitor to one with a larger default resolution.

Fixed that and just got used to the mammoth monitor that now looms over the counter and Ubuntu decided it wouldn’t play nice with vmware any more. I need that vwmare to run the ancient Win98 system that handles the delivery orders.

All I can say is welcome back XP. Spent bloody ages installing an old OEM version that was lying about and even longer taking it through SP1, SP2 and SP3 updates. At last though, it all plays nice with my virtual image and USB serial adapter (for caller ID). I had to take off the webserver though which I use to serve the new order pages. I need that to work, we have new drivers who need maps!!

Home Pc plays it too

Windows 7. RC1. Finished.

New Windows 7 Ulitmate installed and functioning with a VMware image of Ubuntu which is now serving the pages to all the PC’s on the shop and home network…. just in time for my Sky router to start playing up. Now a direct cable connection spazzes it out and the wireless keeps dropping off . bwahhhh!

Work..WORK

I had lots of fun things planned for ComLuv and other pet projects these past two weeks but it’s all been put aside so I can fix these real life, gotta work or we dont get paid, things. I think I am on top of most of it (except the sky router) but I’m so knackered from doing all the fire fighting that all I wanna do now is watch some movies and pretend I don’t have a PC (for a little while).

What a load of bollox! This seems to be the week I experience maximum crashage.

Hard times/drive

First, my shop pc had a hard drive crash. A massive one. The drive wouldn’t even spin! I tried the usual methods found on a Google like putting it in a plastic bag and putting it the freezer which is supposed to fix a jammed disc.

nope.

Then I tried what this page tried. Basically, swapping the logic board from an identical drive to the faulty one. That actually got the drive spinning and recognized in windows but unfortunately, it was completely trashed. Every sector screwed and no matter what software apps I threw at it, it wouldn’t play. (so I took it apart to see how it works)

Lost code

All my backups of my server where on that disc. All.of.them!

In a great wave of relief, I found that 99% of it had been updated to the live server only the day before. The 1% that didn’t just so happened to be my awesome edit of the pay-to-blog plugin which I was about to put on ComLuv. dammit, that was some good coding I added to the plugin.

It would have allowed me to set a free time limit on new blogs of say 30 days and when that runs out, the next time the blog owner tried to log on, they would be presented with a page where they can pay a piddly 5 USD to have the blog enabled for a year. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t pay then they could request a free blog and that would notify me by email and list the request on my admin page.

I’ll have to rewrite the code and I bet I can’t remember how I did it!

New install, new problems

I managed to grab another hard drive and put it in the box to replace the poop one. Installed Ubuntu 9.10 and vwmare and got all the shop POS software working with the ancient equipment we have. Sweet! until… only 24 hours of nice working, it went pooooop. Something to do with i810 video drivers missing. Cue 5 hours pissing about with sudo apt-get and other linux bollox until at last, it is working again.

And then Vmware decided to stop working with the serial port via USB. Pleh!

More sudo apt-get and 2 hours later, I found an old vwmare image for the win98 system and copied over the contents of the .vmx file and ta-da! it worked again.

No more please!

No more. thanks. done it now.

New Wheels

Even these got delayed by 3 days. Next day delivery bleeeeuuurrgh!

What this cliché expression doesn’t add is “if you haven’t got a lifejacket, you learn to make one fast or drown”

Oh the fun of metaphoric rainy days. This week just about everything to do with databases, servers, operating systems and hard disks went a bit squirly. Luckily, it all being digital stuff, I wasn’t prone to panic

This is what I learned by fighting digital fires all frickin week.

• 1GB of RAM isn’t really enough for a million hits plus website if there are tens of thousands of complex mysql statements happening every day.
• Ubuntu can crash too.
• Linux may be more powerful but that just means the crashes are even more spectacular.
• UKFast have really awesome tech support who can answer your call in two rings and be all geeky with your server and do fantastic things while they talk to you on the phone like you called to chat about the weather.
• Crisis makes you code better.
• An external hard drive isn’t a ‘safe’ place to store important data if you let other people use it to “just copy some mp3′s”
• Having another partition for your my documents folder is a really really good idea.
• Life without tweetdeck on my work pc is a bit pants
• Tweetdeck on Ubuntu is also a bit pants when you can’t unlock your default keyring
• It feels like a genius stroke to send a copy of my menu.lst from /boot/grub/ to my gmail address
• Blogging about it makes it better.
• Coding stuff because you need it, makes it worth more when it works.
• If I didn’t have my missus to ground me, I would have stabbed at least 3 people this week. seriously, with a spoon! (because it hurts more)
• It’s bloody hot in summer when you can’t go out.

What have you learned this week?