"i've just picked up a fault in the ae35 unit. it's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours."
i may be a bit behind on both the blog and my linkblog for about a week or so. it's not as if anyone will notice, but i thought i'd post a note on the church door to let you know i'm away.
what's with the vacation? my ibook - which i have lived on since november - is going in for logic board issues. as i brought it back from sleep last night my lcd did the horizontal line shimmy and froze up. i went into a panic as i shut the computer down and i walked to the fridge for a cold one. after letting it breathe for a bit, i powered it back on and worked on it for fifteen minutes before it repeated it's behaviour.
i murmured "dave, my mind is going. i can feel it." and shut it down again.
after sitting the ibook on my desk, zapping the pram and checking a few more things i worked with it some more. things were stable until i moved the ibook to my lap and it did it's little pixel jig again. fuck. at the very least it would seem i can keep it on a steady surface and it'll be fine.
i managed to ssh into my server at the office and started frantically checking the dates on my backups. it would seem that the last sucessful backup was two weeks ago. shit. i sacrifice performance three times a week while i'm at work so i can build a full .dmg of my home directory for this? well, it's what i get for piecing a backup script together out of example shell code and my rudimentary perl knowledge.
i did some last ditch backups [see: my whole home directory to an .iso] and i decided to go to bed. at the very least i could call apple support in the morning.
the alarm rang, waking me at 6am pst. apple support answered right away [they should have seeing as how it's first thing in the morning] and after getting my info "bob" had me recreate and describe the problem. then he had me zap the pram again and attempt to recreate the problem again. both times i had it locked up in 5 minutes and the apple tech was extremely understanding about my fustration.
anyhow, by 6.45am pst bob is drop shipping me a package to send in my laptop for service. diagnosis: logic board. i got a tracking number and was told to make sure i've got a backup handy in case things get restored to factory default. bob made sure all my questions were answered before letting me go and really calmed me down.
best. tech support call. ever.
after i took a shower and ate some breakfast, i proceeded to head in to work early and start pushing the backed up data to my server via the local lan connection. it was there that i found the culprit. both the cron job that cleared backups older than a month and the one that let me know that the disk was full had failed. three months of thrice weekly backups between two to eight gigs a pop had helped fill the 120gb hd on my server. now it's been pointed out to me that i'd probably be better of using incremental backups. after seeing my server filled up from my paranoid style backups i'd actually agree. time to rewrite some scripts.
so my data's stowed away, safe and sound on my work server. in seperate .iso's for each home folder. md5 checksums have been generated for each iso, which has also tediously been backed up to cd. before i leave work early to go vote i'm going to swing by my favorite local mac friendly cafe in fullerton [see: plush] and rent some time on an emac. this way i can hopefully boot the ibook up into target disk mode and get a redundant backup burned off on dvd as well. obsessive about my backups? just a bit.
i'm going to miss it, but i should have it back sometime next week in hopefully tip top condition. wish me luck.
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