Sunday, October 24, 2004

Sometimes Technology Sucks

I am my own IT (Information Technology) manager at home. I don't like that job, but it is my own fault for setting up a network requiring 3 servers for various services (mail, DNS, web hosting, file serving, home automation, media server, blah, blah...) and a number of client machines and devices strewn around the house. As time goes by, the list of things I need to deal with gets so long that I need to take a weekend to fix as many of the issues as possible.

This was one of those weekends.

My DNS/Web/Mail server was running extraordinarily slow (15 minutes to boot). (WHY?)
Mail server didn't automatically start up when the server rebooted. (WHY?)
Desktop machine didn't have enough memory to edit lots of photos (easy to fix)
Media Center PC needed an OS update to the latest version (Ugh!)
My iPod wouldn't charge when connected to my PC (on the contrary, it would drain the battery quickly) (Why?)
etc.

Earlier this week I needed to repair the OS after my hard drive got corrupted (this is after that same machine was gone for 2 weeks because it stopped being able to charge its battery).

So I went to Fry's yesterday and ComputerStop today to get miscellaneous parts, spent hours last night rebuilding the server, and more hours this afternoon doing a complete reinstall of the server (it turns out the perf problem was the hard drive) then reconfiguring all of the services on the machine. Of course, it didn't go flawlessly. My ethernet port on the server is unable to connect to anything when it has a static IP address (WHY?) Mail server wouldn't start up (WHY?) There is a scripting error on one of my web sites but it doesn't show the right error messages (WHY?)

Anyway, most of these problems are either fixed, or worked around for now. Now it is time for some baseball and the Glenlivet.

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