A bad week for the home LAN

I didn’t have time to update this blog last week. Most of my free computer time was spent on recovering my home linux server.
Tuesday evening, the three months old 500GB SATA disk of my home server crashed! And it crashed big time. Nothing but ‘tak-tak –tak’ and it was impossible to recover anything from the damn thing.

Fortunately, I had setup an rsync which synced all my data and most of the server configuration to an external USB disk every night. Not much data was lost.
But, even then, restoring the server took more time than I expected. This is mostly because I learnt the hard way that having all the config files on a backup is not a guarantee for a fast restore. Installing all the apps (with dependencies), compiling some soft, compiling a custom kernel for the motherboard takes a LOT of time.

Therefore I have taken my precautions in case the replacement disk should decide to go on permanent leave in the near future. I googled a bit and found mkCDrec. This neat tool allows one to create a bootable recovery CD set from the entire system including installed applications. When necessary, you can boot with the CD set and quickly restore the system in the state when you created the disks.

So from now on, whenever I make big changes to the system. I just run mkCDrec, save the ISO images to my external disk and that’s it: I am a little better prepared for when Murphy strikes once more.

Next on the improvement list: buy a small UPS for when lightning strikes