Well I had planned on recording a new podcast Sunday morning but, as luck would have it, things took a turn for the worse!

Every year the church I used to attend and the school they run downstairs, pays me a fee for computer maintenance. For their one time fee they get year round support from me. I told them they didn’t have to pay me, but they insisted and, so, to keep tax forms and junk out of the equation, I get a meager, but welcomed, payment. Normally they dont have too many problems. The schools main concern is QuickBooks while the church just wants to keep their network and equipment in good condition, so I dont normally have to go out to the church but once a month, if that. Normally I deal with most situations through remote access.

Well lo and behold, this year I was to be tested right off the bat. After receiving my payment and doing some dusting on their remaining Windows PCs I had their server do some updates, which seemed to be working fine. I remotely told the thing to restart at the end of the work day after everyone had gone home for the day and found out the next morning that I could not remotely log in. Since I was headed to the church anyway I decided to take a look and found that for some unknown, god-awful reason the RAID array had taken a dump.

For those of you not in the know a RAID array uses multiple hard drives in a computer for redundancy so that, if a drive goes bad and stops working, you dont lose data and can quickly recover by replacing the bad drive and keeping the process running. This is, of course, the most simplistic explanation, since there are several different types of RAID configurations, each one with its pros and cons.

This particular server, however, uses a RAID 1 array which is simply one drive is in use while the other mirrors it. In the event one drive crashes you SHOULD be able to pull it out, replace it, reassign it as part of the array and get back to work, but of course if that happened I wouldn’t be making this post.

Suffice to say that after about ten hours in my office working on whatever was wrong with the RAID controller, reinstalling Windows server and retrieving backups from Carbonite (which I HIGHLY recommend purchasing if you care about your data) I got absolutely nothing done as far as a podcast, working on my book, artwork, housework, etc. I did, however, go late in the evening to both Home Depot and Lowes and picked up a new work table for the garage, a couple of pretty blue pots for plants and a few boards.

Maybe I can get to a podcast this week. I will try.

Hopefully your weekend was better than mine.