Andrew's diary

Sunday, 23 April 2006

Lots of gardening (fortunately with lots of parental help).

Alex tried - for the first time - the baby bouncer that David bought. Now, I don't want to be one of those parents always going on about "little Jimmy", but isn't he cute?

Friday, 21 April 2006

The HD fillers which Covenco said would be delivered today, weren't. However the breakout cable is working well and using a grub-boot floppy I've just bootstrapped the existing IDE hard disk. Woohoo!

This means that, all going well bleb.org will be back up and running next Tuesday evening (when I'm next in Redhill and so more convenient for getting to Maidenhead). Sorry for the inconvenience, thank you for all the donations and messages of support - it's appreciated.

Thursday, 20 April 2006

Well, the C2T breakout cable has now arrived from Covenco. Unfortunately it's been delivered to home, rather than where I am. So the server won't be online tonight (as planned). The hard drive fillers are also missing, but they can be added at a later date.

Saturday, 15 April 2006

Unfortunately there's a hitch with the new server: despite hacking it to provide power to an IDE drive (and the BIOS recognising it) there's no way to set an IDE HD as an element in the boot sequence. Fortunately, the very generous donations should be able to go towards a SCSI HD, if I can find one at a reasonable price. There was a perfect one on eBay earlier, but I was outbid by a couple of quid during Doctor Who :-/

Thursday, 13 April 2006

Fallen back to the "web forwarding" feature of my DNS provider to make sure people can see the status of what's going on, correspondingly the number of donations has picked up: many thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.

Tuesday, 11 April 2006

The 4-post rails required have been ordered from Rack Solutions  and will be delivered on Thursday. The necessary VGA/keyboard breakout cable & HD fillers will be sourced from Covenco. I've ordered some bits & bobs from Maplin to ensure I can get power to the IDE drives.

Of course, this is all very expensive for a "hobby". Donations welcome (thanks to those who've donated so far).

Monday, 10 April 2006

I now have a new server, an IBM xSeries 330 which should perform much better (and be more reliable) compared with the old box. Unfortunately, it's missing some items so it may not be possible to be back up and running this week.

Saturday, 08 April 2006

It's definitely not the hard disk, the RAM or the PSU. I suspect the processor has cooked itself. Unfortunately it's not replacable on the VIA Mini ITX motherboards so something will have to be replaced.

Tuesday, 04 April 2006

I've removed the server from its rack due to it continually rebooting at the same point in the boot sequence.