I like Kasia's latest idea. Let's all try that. But not on the same day. Maybe we should all use our birthdays as the basis. Since I was born on June 4th, I'll be stupid on the 4th of every month.
Heh. I fear that it would get old after a few months. Maybe. But it'd be fun while it lasted, and it might even make a point.
I forgot to write this up yesterday and didn't feel like forging the blog entry date. Anyway, while taking a break from writing the book, I tried to finish up the work on friends.zawodny.com before I ship it off to get racked at WCNet where family.zawodny.com (which hosts jeremy.zawodny.com) has sat for about two years.
The new machine has 2 80GB Maxtor disks, one on each IDE channel. I have four RAID-1 filesystems (using Linux software RAID) on the drives: /, /usr, /var, and /home. I did some tinkering around and, after a few Goggle searches, I managed to get it to boot from either disk in the event of a failure. When hda failed (I unplugged it), the system booted from hdc just fine. And when hdc failed, it booted just fine from hda and ran in "degraded" mode until I rebooted with both disks and used raidhotadd to re-add the previously failed partitions to each RAID volume.
This is excellent. I had trouble getting this to work on machines in the past and opted for simply having the data on RAID volumes but no fail-over for booting. Now that I've seen it work, I see no need to ever really bother with hardware RAID. The built-in stuff works great.
I should note that I had tried to out-smart things (using the information like that found here) but it never worked for me. Once I tried to just follow the directions and told LILO that I wanted to use /dev/md0 rather than /dev/hda, it Just Worked. Excellent!
Combine all that with the fact that the Debian Woody install CD allows me to select from ext2, ext3, and ReiserFS at installation time, it's now far easier to build a robust Linux server that it used to be.
Strangely, I managed to get up before 9am (on a Sunday!) without the aid of an alarm clock. Not sure how that happened. I had some breakfast (muffin with jelly and peanut butter, and strawberry drink) while catching up on e-mail (not much) and blogs (a little more).
I had NPR on for background noise and because I often listen to Weekend Edition on KQED FM.
While listening, I got to hear a great discussion with Peter Gabriel about his new album: Up. I really enjoyed the piece and was thrilled to hear that his first studio album in 10 years is now available. I've been a big fan for a long, long time. I've already ordered it and hope share my thoughts on it later this week.