Requiescat in pieces

[mdlbear]

The YD's desktop computer died in Wednesday's power outage, which lasted about an hour and a half. So did my 8-port GigE switch, apparently, which led to another hour's worth of confusion getting the network back up when I came home in the evening. (I had cleverly turned off the fileserver and my desktop machine from work. If I'd had any sense I'd have sync'ed my to.do file first.)

The YD's Windows machine was the big one, though: it wasn't recognizing her hard drive. The older Windows box in the public area upstairs recognized it just fine, but of course all her files were private. You'd think there'd be a way for an administrator to unprotect a directory, but I'm not a Win$ expert.

What worked, yesterday evening, was putting it in my desktop Linux box and rsyncing it onto both my local hard drive and the YD's external drive. She was delighted to get her homework back.

There was a lot of stress involved in the process, of course, on all sides. I seem to have a very bad habit of saying the YD's name, at increasing volume, to get her attention when she's yelling in panic or frustration; I ought to look for a gentler alternative to shouting her down.

There was also a lot of stress during the network diagnosis and bring-up phase Wednesday evening -- nothing like a housefull of laptop-using family and guests to add pressure to an already frustrating experience.

I'd been sort of looking for an excuse to buy a 16- or 24-port switch, but... I really didn't need the extra expense this month, either.

Comments

[mdlbear]

Thanks. I have plenty of spare pieces floating around; I should be able to cobble something together by Wednesday.