A little better
On Tuesday I went out to CompUSA and picked up a 200Gb disk (I really don’t need that much disk space but it was like five bucks more than the 100Gb drive) and a new UPS. Used knoppix to boot the dead machine and started poking around the drive. It was in pretty good shape all things considered, I lost /etc, /usr and parts of /var. I lost my databases in /var, but website was unharmed and most importantly /home was fine. Getting /etc just right again will take a while, but no real harm. The copying took forever, somewhere on the order of 4 or 5 hours. I went to sleep before it finished. I’m not sure what took so long there was only about 15Gb of data, really shouldn’t have taken that long.
This time time I really am going to use cron and rsync to mirror data on both machines so I don’t have this problem again. No, really I am. Really.
Anyway woke up Wednesday all early and installed Debian before work. Something got messed up and the installer and later apt-get refused to install perl. A linux distribution without perl isn’t really much of a linux distribution, very few things actually work. Went off to work, considered calling in sick computer, but didn’t. Got home in the evening and wiped the disk and tried again, worked this time. Obviously the omens weren’t quite properly aligned last time. Diddled with it most of last night (minus a few hours for City of Heroes) and finally got postfix, imap and squirrelmail working. Yay, I’m no longer rejecting email.
The current Debian comes with apache2 (I was on 1.3) and my config file doesn’t quite work right so I deactivated the website until I can be relatively confident I’m not accidentally giving people access to things I don’t want them to see. Besides since MySql isn’t up yet, half the site is broken anyway.
So tonight todo is website and MySql. Once that gets done I’ll be back on the Internet.