Not long ago all of my online presence was moved to a VM (a “virtual server”) which was hosted on a trusty physical server that my friend/colleague and I had configured and tested. Obviously we made sure that the drives would be safe by using RAID 1, and it ran like a team of athletes until last Sunday. Because it was “new” and “safe” I worried less about backups and so the universe decided to punish me.

We still don’t know what is wrong. The box is located far away and we can’t physically get to it until Saturday. Also the co-lo don’t do KVMoIP and the engineers are less than enthusiastic. Yeah we have IPMI and yeah it didn’t work when we actually needed it.

What this means is, in the words of Jack Regan from The Sweeney, “I am utterly and abjectly pissed-off”. We moved to a new, safe, well organised server to get the most out of the hardware and keep the data safe; it let us down in the most serious way. I don’t want to deal with this side of things anymore; the tech side of maintaining working servers has lost its magic for me now – JUST WORK YOU BASTARDS!

This time the ennui and disappointment almost made me give up with the hosting altogether; it’s taken me three days to get my blog back into some sort of order. All of the normal people people who use blogger/tumblr/posterous don’t have this crap to deal with so why do I? The other sites are still down, and the idea of resurrecting them is bringing me down. I’m paying cash money now (although not very much at all) and so at some point I’m going to have to ditch the few remaining sites I’ve been hosting as favours; not because of resentment, but just because I need the freedom to be able to say “fuck it” at any time and stop worrying without affecting other people.

We released an owl last night with Brendan. It was refreshing and quite moving. I’ve just finished reading another Hemmingway book and it has obviously affected me and it was grand.