I suppose you'd call this a live blog?

The event of an evening! PETRA LIVES!

My raid, my backup server, it's now named (hold on.. I got to log into it, setting up drivers and whatnot..) Petra!

I decided to revive the name since the old Petra couldn't possibly still be around anymore. She was my first server! and she was stolen by Stuyvesant high school back in 2001. I could still access her up until 2003 when she was rooted and I moved all my crap off of it, came up with better passwords and quit being so naive about computer security. (I sucked and continue to suck at it... I hope my clients don't read my blog.)

The only reason why I suck (despite not keeping on top of everything) is that eventually, bugs will be found in anything and be used to execute code. And once you got your own code running the box is yours. So I've been keeping safe by not running any servers, nothing to attack.

I'm keeping this server off my network, and keeping my clients data (and mine) encrypted so even if the box does get rooted (and by all means it's possible) the worst that will happen is everyone needs to backup again. That being said, there's a lot to do to lock this thing down, that I wont go into here.

Wooo!!!

I've never had an array so big. *snif

I've got to reinstall, and I'm probably going to go with the 32 bit version of windows 2003 server. These screen shots are on a .. trial.. copy of Windows Server 2003 x64 (64 bit version) but since none of my software runs 64 bit.. there's no reason for it. And even if I could find a reason for it, I'm not convinced that all the drivers have 64 bit support. (I hate this motherboard vendor.) The unused 65.18 gig volume is for booting. When I get my copy of 2003 server, I'll slipstream the raid drivers and install directly to the raid), the 1331.79 gig volume is for the backing up.

Oh and the reason why I couldn't get it to work the first.. 5ish times was that the bios was out of date, some chipset wasn't getting called right and during windows install the system would lock up. I was convinced it was the raid (I've had bad luck with them in the past.) and it took until tonight to make the free time (seriously, all my neighborhood friends were busy, all of them) to pull the raid controler and determine that it still didn't work. The not working of this motherboard had me so enraged that I was ready to toss it and buy another one. But then I'd have to make sure it took the same cpu and ram and everything.

I ended up finding a bios update...

I recently got really good at putting bios updates in floppy images and then burning cds with floppy emulation boot loaders. Sounds complicated, but it's not (I just have a really stupid way of doing it, I wish I had a single program that could do it or something), most computers with floppy drives have broken floppy drives, and most older computers that need bios updates need to do it in dos, which means booting off a floppy. (Well most of the time.. these are computers, 10,000 ways to solve any problem.) Came in handy at work.

Yawn, I'm going to let the raids rebuild over night, and I've got to find some way to reset the raid controller's password (I set it one night while drinking, I was very happy I got the thing powered up) because I forgot it. But even if I don't finish this tomorrow (well.. I wont) I need to get my copy of windows and the backup software. I'm just happy this project is back to moving along.

=D

-Franics