We all have Good Days and we all have Bad Days. I'd been having a Good Day so far - got stuff I wanted done in the garden; photographed a Sparrowhawk; cleaned the car and had a surprise visit from my daughter bearing home-baked muffins!
I had also finished copying all the files from my old server (running ClarkConnect) to my new server (running Amahi) and I was ready to decommission the old server. All was going well. I took apart the old server in readiness for fully decommissioning it and literally had a pile of disks, cables, a motherboard and a case in my workshop.
Then my Significant Other asked to go online and check our bank accounts with our accounts program, something she regularly does as a check and a monitor of how we are doing.
Bad Times...
Not good. The accounts program she uses couldn't find any datafiles! All of a sudden the day was starting to look very far from good. Looking at the files I had copied to the new server showed that everything else was copied across and was safe - including a two month old copy of our accounts - but not the up to date one she had been using. Puzzling. A bit of checking on her computer showed that I had copied the data two months ago but had not adjusted how the accounts program accessed the files, so the accounts package expected the files to be on the old server and was still updating the old server files instead of the copy I had made on the new server. Add to this the fact that the latest backup she had of her data was three weeks old. "Easy enough to fix", I hear you cry, "Just copy the files again from the old server to the new". But, if you recall, I had decommissioned the old server and it now was a pile of disks, cables, a motherboard and a case on my worktop....My heart sank.
You know I had my share...
So, prepared for the worst, I took the lid off a test computer I use for all sorts of things - an old, venerable 2GHz Athlon processor. I added the raid controller and the server system disk to the computer and then had to guess the order I needed to connect the three identical data disks in to re-create the RAID. I booted it, stepped through the start-up, re-configured the hardware (although this was CentOS, a linux derivative. It did the reconfiguring; all I did was confirm each step) and watched for errors. None. The system booted fine; all the disks in the right order. All I had to do was to tell it what its IP address should have been and then connect to it and copy off the data. A quick check to make sure and everything was fine.
So it actually turned out to be a Good Day (and an extremely LUCKY day) after all.
