This is getting annoying

Found the fileserver frozen again this morning. This time it happened at about 5am, with darned near nothing going on -- there are no cron jobs scheduled for anywhere near that time. The older kernel does not seem to have made a difference. Grumble. One difference between this machine and the others I have running Etch is that it was upgraded from Sarge rather than installed from scratch. Since I have a new 400GB drive, I may try a clean install. Kind of a bore because it involves a lot of setup, but it may be worthwhile.

I tweaked my backup script so that it uses NFS mounts instead rsync over ssh -- NFS has the nice property of being stateless, and it will wait forever if the server goes down. Seems to take about the same time, so I'll leave it that way.

Cat toy

With an anniversary present of $250 from my Mom burning a hole in our figurative pockets, and the flower_cat having done a huge amount of research beforehand, we set out this morning to buy a smoker. No, not a cigarette smoker -- what would we want with one of those? This kind of smoker. Actually, it's both a smoker and a grill -- you can burn charcoal in either the firebox or the smoker chamber. Pretty cool. Or hot, as the case may be.

Since the place where we bought it wanted $85 for delivery, and since we'd cleverly driven in my car, the Cat came back (there's a song in there somewhere) on the way home from Pantheacon and had them load it into her van. Better them than me. The chaoswolf and I unloaded it (two huge boxes, and heavy as heck; I was glad to have bought a folding hand-truck last year); it is now sitting in boxes on our driveway/patio waiting to be assembled, which will probably take me much of tomorrow afternoon.

( image behind cut )

Shiny!

Elite Micro DVD±R
( must... not... drool... on... keyboard... )

For somewhat less than twice the price one can get this one, with twice the throughput and a built-in PC. Probably can't justify either of them at this point, but it's awfully tempting.