On Monday, September 3rd, at 4pm, my flight from San Francisco to Paris took off, the beginning of a 16 day vacation in France. Approximately 20 hours later, the power supply on my server died, taking this blog, and the rest of my web sites, and my mail, and DNS, and other services, with it.
The defunct server is a Pentium 166 with 256 megs of RAM and a 2.1 gig hard disk, and qualifies as useless junk in those excess-and-salvage auctions of defunct companies that are all the rage these days.
I had all my sites and services back up and running within 2 hours of getting home, by moving the hard disk from that system to another useless PC (this one a 150MHz Cyrix system with only 80 megs of RAM), and running on it instead.
The dead server is more than 4 years old. You would think that it could have died a few hours earlier, or a few weeks later, and not caused me to be down for more than two weeks.
Ah, well…