This morning, I woke up and tried to check my email. Unfortunately, my machine wouldn't perform this task. I went upstairs to find the screen on my server filled with errors about one of my hard disks. I then restarted the server and heard a dreadful clicking noise emminating from the drive. I proceeded to identify which drive was bad, and got a base debian installed on one of the other drives before I left for work.

On a side note: the Brinks people showed up this morning unannounced to 'install' our system. Turns out that all the windows around the house had the sensors installed to detect open/close, but didn't have the corresponding magnets installed. So, the system thought all the windows were open. They finally got this worked out after about 1 hour and 30 mins (so Libby tells me).
Back to my tale of woe. I couldn't get LILO working this morning, so I headed off for work having booted with the kernel on the CD. I ssh'd from work and restored MySQL and Web content from backup. Unfortunately, the backup of my photo gallery stopped working when I upgraded one of the two servers involved and the "rdiff-backup"'s on each end could no longer talk. Luckily this was less than a month ago (Feb 16th). I still need to restore this data, which is on the machine located in St. Louis at Libby's family's home. This machine (from which this weblog is served) will probably have some downtime tonight as I sanitize the hard disk configuration, and try to get it to boot on its own! Reminder to everyone: backup your data!

Update: 23:20 System now boots on its own. Apparently it doesn't like running LILO off a 60 GB drive. Also got AwStats back up and running.