On Friday, I needed to add disk space to the RAID 5 array on my server. I’m using a 3ware 9550SX-8LP RAID controller, which I’ve generally been very happy with. It has support for online capacity expansion, so I decided to reconfigure it to drop the hot spare drive, then add that drive [...]

I was able to recover the /home partition from the disk that Windows clobbered a week ago.  Windows overwrote the partition table, and none of the usual methods I’ve used for data recovery were able to find it, nor was gpart.  I ended up writing a program to scan for likely ext2/ext3 superblocks, identified the [...]

I’m trying to copy an NTFS partition from an external USB drive to a spare partition on the internal IDE drive of my laptop.  In the process, before I’d even so much as gotten Ghost to start doing anything, Windows XP managed to write a copy of the external drive’s partition table over that of [...]

I have a damaged DVD that will no longer play in my DVD player. My computer seems to be able to read it OK. The official position of the MPAA is that I’m shit-outa-luck, and should just buy another copy. Naturally I prefer to exercise fair use rights, and make a backup [...]

A 200G drive in one of my RAID systems failed today. Since it was RAID 5, no data was lost. However, the original drive had an actual capacity of 203G, while new ones sold with the identical part number are only 200G even. So I can’t put an “identical” replacement in; I’ll [...]

Originally Mike thought only his garage and a small portion of the house needed to be torn down and rebuilt. However, it has now been determined that the entire house must be torn down.
Mike has been able to recover data from the disks in one of the computers from the garage [...]

I’ve just set up an album of photos of my server after the fire.

My server is finally online again. It was actually down for less than three days, but it seemed like forever. Thanks very much to:

Andy Rubin for providing high-speed internet access,
Steven Ellis for helping with data recovery,
Scott Dattalo, Steven Ellis, and Brad Parker for contributing to the cost of the replacement [...]

Some time back, a friend asked me to provide backup DNS for his domains, including some commercial ones, and I was happy to oblige. But it turns out that he never put ns2.brouhaha.com into the registrar’s records for the domain. So now those domains depend on his server and my primary, both of [...]

More on the aftermath of the fire. But first, a bit of history of the machine. It was an older system that had been through many generations of motherboard, CPU, and drive upgrades. For a while now, it’s had an Asus P2B (or perhaps P2B-F) slot 1 motherboard with a Celeron 766 [...]