Random

So this weekend, my home server machine, that does all sorts of stuff for me, decided to crash. I rebooted, and noticed that one of my virtual machines running inside vmware didn't start. Upon spending some time with it, it became obvious that the disk was corrupt, well beyond what an fsck could fix. So I reinstalled, luckily I had backups. Later that day, same thing. At this point I fsck the real disk (fsck on 1TB takes a long time), which fails miserably. So I rebuild that drive, then rebuild my virtual machines, then the next day the server crashes again.

This sad game went on for a while longer before I finally ran memtest86. It lit up like a Christmas tree (note to self, do this first next time).

So the real point of this post though, is to comment on how painless the Corsair RMA process is (they made the RAM in question). Everything was via a web site, and in a few hours, I had my RMA sheet and was off to the post office. It's always nice when I'm ready to throw the computer in a lake, something goes right.

The extra cool thing is I bought this memory as a 2 stick deal, they offered to replace both sticks. Sadly I need this computer to be running, so that didn't happen, but I still dig the idea behind it.

In a strange way, this also makes me happy, as CentOS 5.4 is just days away, so I figure I'll wait and use KVM instead of vmware, which will give me a whole new world of headaches

So while visiting my bank today, I noticed a shiny metal box on the side of the building clearly marked as "Burglar Alarm". I hope for the sake of sanity, that's not REALLY the burglar alarm, but rather just a shiny box to trick stupid thieves and make us customers feel safer.