Two Slashes

As most people probably know, I recently switched to a new dedicated server to host all of the projects I’m associated with, partially as the result of a group decision to ditch the ailing PhreakBox.  Things had been working great…until Friday, that is.

Of all the things that could happen in that particular week, and of any of the seven days in that week, it had to be Friday that the server’s hard drive decided it needed a permanent vacation, along with everything else going on in my life.  That’s right, all of the stored content for Two Slashes, LostCarrier.net, TechCentric, and any of my other projects ended up disappearing forever into the ether.

Being a responsible administrator, and knowing full-well that according to my provider’s AUP statement that they won’t recover data, I’ve got reasonably up-to-date backups (wait, that’s a first, isn’t it?) of everything, so it’s not like there’s more than a few hit statistics missing or anything, but there’s a lot of data to transfer and it’s very time-consuming.  Especially not great timing if you factor in my upcoming finals and all of the homework my professors have been assigning me.

But, like I said, it’s a long and strenuous process.  Most of Friday was spent in e-mail exchanges with the support people at my provider’s hosting facility, requesting an IPKVM and necessary configuration information and reloading the operating system and essential services, and having the techs look at a few issues as they came up.  I have to commend and offer thanks to them for their hard work and help in getting everything back online (and they didn’t pay me to write that), but there’s still the problem that recovery isn’t a drop-and-go ordeal; I’ve got to double-check that everything restored correctly (so far, so good) and rewrite configurations where necessary.  It’s not what I’d rather be spending my weekend doing.

On a different note, Digg managed to distract me for a few minutes with this morsel:  a gentle prod of current computer security techniques and why they are outdated and now qualify as “insecurity” techniques.  I think it has some merit to it and is at least worth looking over; even if you’ve barely got a shred of intelligent thought about you, a lot of what’s mentioned should be common sense but isn’t for some odd reason (i.e. precedent?).

And no matter what those “security experts” come up with, I don’t think they can hold anything to the owner of this fine automobile I saw parked on the street earlier today.  Sky blue with owner-added (and crappy - notice the mistakes between the top and bottom of the driver’s door) striping (which looks like some sort of black tape, I might add) just screams “I’m the brightest bulb!”, doesn’t it?  I would love to meet the person who parked that contraption there so that I can congratulate them on driving an oxygen-deprived zebra.

EDIT:  And for anyone who wants to complain about LostCarrier’s downtime, go right ahead.  I’m sure Last.fm is having a great time dealing with all of the downtime they’ve been experiencing this weekend as well.

There really hasn’t been much I’ve felt warranted enough attention for me to rant on it so far this week, but I can let you in on a project or two in the works.

First off, I’d like to announce the start of LostCarrier IRC Network. With TechCentric and our partner show BSoD hosting two linked IRC servers, yet sharing so much else, it made sense that we brought the communications aspect (and some smaller side projects from that) together under one name. So, with that in mind, mosey on over to LostCarrier.net for more information. If you’re looking to see what IRC is all about, you’re more than welcome to party on with us. Start your own channel, or join an existing one; the fun can be had either way, and I’ll be around to help if you need it.

I’ve got some school-related projects coming up (one of which I would prefer not talking about at the moment), including what I hope to be an interesting research piece into the use of technology in higher education, and the problems and solutions it presents. Yes, I’m excited because it means I get to rant…even if I have to cite every other argument.

Shameless plugs for my new projects aside, I will be going on spring break from classes later this week and should have some time to work on the site and/or post some of my backlog…I hope. We’ll see.

And remind me to rant about related topics to this at some point.