I am hoping my fellow followers across a couple platforms are enjoy this holy day if you celebrate it.

I’ve had a wild March. It came in the middle of the month as a lion and it’s coming out as a lamb. It was the case of when everything could go wrong – went wrong! From redundant servers, to redundant backups, to having an effed up network, to backup wifi dripping the attempted Off Topic Tuesday video at 3 different times in the last week, I couldn’t catch abreak.

This situation began with my “core” server using the infamous VMware running multiple operating systems for different needs where it would randomly power off. If it happened on the third time, it had to trip the UPS device for emergency power backup. Earlier in the month I ordered a new power supply to only see the same situation occur (on for 4 hours to maybe a couple days, power off, then turn it back on same effect same result.) The PPM LED lit up on the HP(E) Proliant DL360 G5 and from what I read it has to do with it’s power management.

I bought this server off eBay a decade ago for under $100 and I had recently upgraded it so it can run at 32GB of RAM with a quad Xeon from the late oughts with nearly 2 TB of storage ( a few little Serial Attached SCSI drives over SATA plugs. The Gen 6 (released in the early teens have the present “modern” harrdware) so I am probably going to save the money and find a DL380 G5 (because of the RAM and Hard Drive investment, it is more powerful and it should be more quieter and less hot because it’s a 2U system compared to the 360 as a 1U that’s an inch and three quarters tall)

I discounted Dells a decade ago until I realized they made those infamous Google Search Appliance Servers (an unmarked Dell PowerEdge R700s) and these had 64+ Gigs of RAM and multi terrabytes storage – not as a standard order, but the maximum support, making them still sought out. Ironically it doesn’t help when modern operating systems need boatloads of RAM and storage and some moderate computing power, but that’s another thing.

An related situation began in mid March when the Mac mini became possessed, pressing buttons when there was no keyboard attached. Attempts at Safe Boot failed (like it never works), so since the system was likely compromised, I then did the upgrade to macOS Mojave, to only realize how bad that was (system acted slower, etc.) So I didn’t realize Mojave was OS X 10.15, and realized Catalina (10.14) worked better. Since I had a running Time Machine backup of the mini for a few months, I was going to switch to the second Time Machine anyways, I should be good to go with recovering apps and settings right?

Wrong. Long story short, I should’ve known the “upgrade” would break recovering to another state in it’s 90 to 120 day running backups.

Fortunately no data was lost significantly, but if the partition where my video edits and other stuff were to fail… well I’m out of luck.

My mother noticed all this drama and was never affected. In late February Comcast Business was contacting us for renewing our contract, and I told the rep that “we have multiple routers” and  sounded impressed? Why?

Because when you have this crap happening, you don’t have a single point of failure unless you consider the modem failing, then it would impact both of us. Because my mother works from home, the uptime is necessary. Sometimes my side of the network goes down for maintenance. The “Internet” (the so-called expression of getting to the outside of the cyberworld) is portion of why we have upgraded connections. The other reason is for ingress from the cyberworld via VPN for remote access. Because i do content creation, I can accrued lots of media that I want to send low res content back to base if I am away in Portsmouth or Keene. By ingesting the loiwer quality media, by the time I get back home, I can start editing and then “liink” high res stuff. The magic of VPN (which is used for 99% of professionals as only for Remote Access not to bypass geowalls for Netflix) the Cisco AnyConnect client and the Cisco ASA VPN router thinks I am at home and not away.

Nearly 70% of the stuff that floats through the many Cat5e cables on Gigabit connections is for my high res photos and video, as well as my virtual machines (think of it as cloning a hard drive that’s the size of what would be in a physical computer.) Wifi is for casual use or for my iOS devices, and never do I use it for critical use because i need something greater than Fast Ethernet to move everything.

For a device less than 5 concurrently exposed to a firewalled Internet, it’s not the connections, but it’s the matter of connectivity (ensuring I have the highest local speed because it’s local first before it goes out.)

I get really annoyed when bimbo podcasters like Chris Williamson say “the Internet” as if it’s some world. For me the Internet Protocol is a very critical extension or driver to all my connected equipment that needs a core system, and a redundant low performing backup if the core goes down, and maybe a plastic “consumer” grade if the low preforming backup goes down too.