Not getting a whole lot done

[mdlbear]

OK, I got in a three-mile walk (dead flat -- around the rose garden), went out shopping for kitchen gadgets with the flower_cat, and did a little cleanup in the office. But other than that about all I've done today is play whack-a-mole with computers.

I still haven't done a backup for today. On the other hand, I'm kind of glad they're not done automatically, since otherwise there's grave danger of making a bad one or propagating filesystem corruption onto the backup drive. Not fun.

At some point I'll have to do a re-install on trantor and get it back into operation. Because it's a workstation I'm willing to trust the disk some more, now that I've rebuilt the filesystems and let mke2fs do its destructive (write/verify with four patterns) test on them. Meanwhile I've been using harmony, the former recording box. It's required a few configuration changes, since it wasn't originally meant as a general-purpose workstation. Most recently that meant fixing the email configuration so that I could actually, you know, send email from it.

Things are complicated by the fact that I've been planning to upgrade the office workstation (partly to take advantage of the DDR2-800 RAM stick I originally bought for trantor under the mistaken impression that it would work in a board designed for -400) and use trantor's CPU and possibly case as the new bedroom studio recording box, because it's practically dead silent.

So that raises the question of whether I should just skip a step, install the new soundcard, and configure it as the recording machine from the start. Probably not: that would need a larger and more trustworthy disk. Last thing I need is to have a disk go out just before -- or during -- a recording session with out-of-town artists. I've already been through that once. No thanks. But I'm not ready to buy another disk right now; I could set it up now and copy the disk later.

Decisions! (Grump.)