There was some light rain early this morning, but the clouds seem to be breaking up now. The latest revision to the forecast says sunshine from 10am. It may only be sunny spells after that, but they should continue through to sunset, It should raise the afternoon temperature to a very nice 21° C today. Tomorrow may see some sunny spells late in the afternoon, but generally it will be dull, and a bit cool. Only 16° C is expected tomorrow.

  Yesterday was a very different day to anything I might have expected, and it was all to do with my web server dying. The short description of yesterday is that I spent the whole day diagnosing the fault on the old server, getting a new server set up, and finally getting a spare server set up ready to use if the current one, serving this web page, fails.

  As I am sure I mentioned yesterday, my web server was an old Toshiba Satelite Pro laptop. There were two pleasing things about it. It was quiet, and the failing battery pack could keep it alive for at least 10 minutes if there was a power cut. (Or use to last about 10, or even 15 minutes, but it has been quite a time since I last checked it). If there was one bad thing about it, it was that it presents a real conundrum when it comes to taking it apart to get at the inside works.

  I became convinced that the reason it kept shutting down was that it was overheating, and that the reason for that was that the CPU fan had siezed up. If I could have gotten to it a single drip of oil on the fan bearing would probably restore it to life for maybe several years. I took every screw out that I could see, and still the bloody thing would not come apart. I did find a manual for the laptop, and it seems there are also screws under the keyboard and speaker panel that need to be taken out as well.

  It seemed that getting at the CPU cooling fan was going to be a very messy job with piles of screws, and all assorted stuff in another pile before I could get to the fan. It is my intention to get to it one day, but to get this web site back on the air I took a different tack. I removed the hard disk from the old server, and cloned it. That took 40 minutes or more. I put the cloned hard disk into my old HP laptop (after taking out, and setting aside the old hard disk for possible future return to it).

  The next step was to use a freely downloadable (as an ISO image that can be burned to a CDR disk) CD called Rescatux. You boot up off the CD, and one of the several useful bits of software on the CD can examine a hard disk, identify any operating systems on the hard disk, and write the bootloader to boot them. The hard disk already has a bootloader, but that was for the the original hard disk, and for the conditions inside the Toshiba laptop.

  It takes maybe 10 minutes for the software to do it's stuff, and then after taking out the CD, and rebooting the PC, or laptop in this case, the server operating system booted up, and I was back on the air. The only thing I needed to do then was to set the correct IP address of the server. It had picked up the same address as the laptop used when it was just a laptop. It was a great relief to use my main PC to connect to the server to display the home page, and several other pages as well.

  Much later in the day I realised there was one small annoyance with the set up of the server. It seems like web pages are transferred to RAM for fast serving, but the file server needs the hard disk to be spinning. Being a laptop, the hard disk is allowed to stop when not in use to save power when running on batteries. I never noticed it on the old server because to my great surprise, that was using a solid state hard disk, and they are ready to give data instantly. At the moment, if, for instance, I want to upload a picture to the server there is a long feeling wait, but probably less than a minute, before the connection is made. I think I can change it so the hard disk doesn't shut down, but I can't decide whether starting and stopping all the time, or continuous running is better for a longer life.

  I must admit I was caught out by the old server dying on me. I had made theoretical plans about what I would do, and that is what I did do, but the obvious thing is to have another PC or laptop already set up as a cold spare ready to be plugged in to get back on the air. While I had all the tools needed at hand I set out to do just that. I have a a mini PC that has been looking for a use for some time (it came out of a skip, and just needed a new hard drive),
  This is the mini PC with a DVD on top of it to give some feeling to the scale of the picture. It was designed so that it could work in a car or van because it is powered by a 12V supply - a power bric for use at home. There were a couple of problems with this PC. The first was that the tiny fans it uses for cooling tend to get noisy after a time. Ideally I should put new ones in, but I have given their bearing a drip of oil, and they run almost quietly - for now !

  The other problem is that inside is a motherboard made by Intel to show off the dual core Atom processor it uses. Intel have used a very cranky BIOS, and many CDs, DVDs, and even some hard disks won't boot properly. I wanted to us a bootable CD called gParted - a hard disk partition editor - to clone the original server hard disk to the internal hard disk of the PC. I tried several version, and all would start to boot, but seemed to get stuck before the full interface came up. I think in this case it was tripping over Intel's graphics chip.

  I wasted a lot of time before giving up on the gparted disc, and actually using a Linux Mint installation disk which includes a copy of gParted as part of it's installation tools. That worked, and I cloned the hard disk. Like before it took about 40 minutes to maybe a full hours before I was ready to try rebooting to the new newly cloned disk. I knew it wouldn't work, but it seemed worth trying it because I was not convinced I could get Rescatux to boot properly. Fortunately it did, and 10 minutes later my stand by server was up and running.

  It was gone 6pm before I had finished all my work. I never expected to spend nearly all after noon, and even a bit of the morning in the back room ! One thing I had done while waiting for stuff to happen on the PCs was to prepare and cook my dinner. It was another beef stew using the other half of the pack of diced beef I had used for the previous night's dinner. The recipe was similar, but I padded this one out with the remains of a bag of mange tout that was just starting to get a bit limp.

  I had my dinner while watching TV (The last half of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but possibly the Simpsons). It was another enjoyable dinner, although the three big red chillies in it didn't add any significant heat (and didn't cause me to sweat later). Apart from a handful of salted peanuts, I hadn't eaten anything else except a bowl of instant noodles for breakfast, and a bowl of Polish style bacon and beans for lunch.

  I was almost tempted to have another early night last night, but I spotted BBC1 were showing Have I Got New For You at 9pm. I watched that for the 30 or 40 minutes it was on before going to bed. I have to say that while it was sometimes amusing watching Have I Got New For You, I came away with the impression the programme has lost it's sparkle. Maybe the two constant panellists, Ian Hislop, and Paul Merton have just got a bit too old and world weary.

  It wasn't extreme like some nights, but the only thing that very slightly spoiled my sleep last night was that old battle between between being too hot or too cold. I suspect it is because we are going through a long transitory change in the weather. I shouldn't complain though because the only time it will be right is when the mornings become agonisingly cold. After that brief time when we came very close to frosty mornings, most mornings are still almost mild, and as such I have just put on warmer clothing, and continue to shun burning expensive electricity to keep warm. It will soon be November when the weather can change a lot. I wonder how long I will be able to keep any heating off ?

  This morning my blood glucose is a pretty average 8.6mmol/l, and so I don't need to take any special precautions - except maybe one. That is to avoid going food shopping. Of course that is one of those things that can't be put off forever, and today I think I will probably end up in Tesco to buy some stuff like meat for more stews, and hopefully nothing too tempting that will bugger up my blood glucose....but sometimes the temptation is just too much.

  Apart from shopping, if indeed I do do that, I am not sure what else I might do today. The imminent prospect of sunny spells could be a lure to go out. There are trains from both Catford and Catford Bridge station, and so a rail photography outing could be a possibility. A walk in the park, possibly the Linear Park which I haven't visited for ages, could be a possibility. The only problem is I don't think I am in the right mood to go out today, buy maybe once I have showered, and got dressed, I might feel more like it.