Month: <span>October 2004</span>

Just had a call that another server has gone down! We think lightening overnight is the culprit. Bang goes the PDC complete with DHCP and DNS services. It’s amazing how many bits of a network rely on one small server. Without DHCP none of the clients can get an IP address or default gateway – no network even though the network is physically fine and the gateway is working. Without DNS none of the workstations know where anything else is.

Oh the joys of computing! Mind you, it is gratifying to have CSC phone Datawise Computing for suggestions….

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It is dead, it is an ex PC…

It’s a bit like buses really. You know the line: none for ages, and then you two together. Another client has suffered a hardware failure: this time it is the hard disk. Getting the new disk was the easy bit, putting back all the applications, printers etc is the pain, and that’s before beginning to reload all the data.

I think I prefer software design to digging about inside PCs – it’s much more civilized.

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It’s been ‘one of those days’ – you know the kind, when the server in the corner that you never think about stops thinking for itself!

The SnapServer today became an ex-server.

I traced the fault to the PSU – problem is, being a 1U rackmount server the PSU is a special slim version. No worries, just use a bog standard PC PSU and thread the cables through the hole left by the removal of the original PSU. It may not look pretty, but it works! It’ll do until the replacement PSU arrives next week, and which point a little down time for replacement will be in order.

But, oh the joys of RAID! One disk out of the four was also problematic, but once up and running the offending drive was rebuilt over the course of the day (whilst the server was being used), so that I could finish the week with one less worry.

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Doing personal web sites is a never ending task as each little nugget of information that is learned must be applied somewhere; every change in fashion assimilated; every cool hack found a use for. Not all are for the better, but with each one a little more is learned through application, and that is the point.

Academic learning is one thing, application is another.

In this case it is the application of a decorative tweak. Although I have tried to avoid using a graphic where markup will do I thought it was time to replace the horizontal lines on the page – hence the new images.

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Having read the book (Designing with web standards), wideplace has had a thorough makeover. As the last of my primary sites to lose tables it has also benefitted from the understanding gleaned from concepts such as ‘semantic markup’ and separation of presentational markup. There’s still some fine tuning to do and one two more pages to add in, but the basic site is looking good.

Note: I’ve now added in the Archives page, placed a link to the RSS feed on the home page, and added some ‘you are here’ colour identification to the navigation bar.

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