tip of the hat to codepope for the recommendation for this neat Skype phone which works onnaMac. I’ve just had a conversation with etriganuk and it worked a treat.
in other news, a large box containing many CDs has just arrived – we have had to sell our soul to the devil, and buy a Microsoft Action Pack for the first time in some years, as we have to do some client work on MS SQL. That’ll be fun …
when I arrived in the study this morning, things weren’t entirely as they should be.
existing connections were ok – IRC, terminal windows, Adium. But Firefox wouldn’t connect to anything and, in my bleary state, I thought Squid was playing up. Went to check a couple of other things, and nothing …
then I realised that no DNS meant a problem with the Windows server. And indeed, when I went into the server room littlest bedroom, it was sitting there with a blue screen on its face. Aaargh.
it won’t boot in safe mode with networking. It won’t boot in safe mode at all. It claims to have an error in its NTFS file system, according to the BSOD. Oh joy. No, there’s no recovery console installed. No, it won’t repair off the CD.
so we will have to go to PCWhirled and pay their extortionate price for a new hard drive, and reinstall the server. I don’t know how many hard drives we’ve bought this year, always with an extra one to keep in stock, but we have gone through the sodding things like a knife through butter recently.
we have backups of all the data, but we don’t bother to back up the OS, so that’ll be a fun day in the workhouse. The backups are on external drives, but they’re all accessed via SMB, so I can’t get to them either.
in the middle of all this, one of the server UPSen started beeping – had blown the fuse in its plug.
good will to all men and peace on earth. But bah bloody humbug to computers.
we are configuring up yet another web server, for a client, which means still more SSH terminal windows.
and I have discovered the joy of different coloured ones, so I can hopefully remember which bloody server I’m using. I currently have black, orange, purple and pale pink.
pastel geek – very chic 🙂
[edit]
orange changed to blue – it was just too icky (sort of tangeriney shade)
I loathe and detest doing the accounts, and generally leave them till way too late. But perlmonger would be even worse at it than I am …
however, I have today posted the VAT return and cheque – *on time* – and furthermore, I have done the figures for the P11D, signed the forms, and sent them, with a small cheque for Her Majesty’s Bloodsuckers, *one whole week* before they need to be in to the Robinue.
go me, I think. Off for a lie down now.