You better give me something to fill the hole.

I had set aside so much of this weekend for catching up on work, but thanks to my server outage it ended up being devoted to data recovery and reconfiguration. However, it did remind me of three things that I often take for granted:

1. Having an easy installer with just the right amount of customization available at the console, like Anaconda, sure makes life easier.
2. Yum rocks.
3. My wife has the patience of a saint.

I decided to throw in the towel after finally getting my weblog back up last night. Then I realized this morning that I also needed to be able to fax from that box, which meant making the winmodem FAILmodem work. And since that relies on some precompiled objects, it won’t work on a 64-bit OS. So I had to start over from scratch, more or less, and revert to a 32-bit OS.

I had some sort of weird router DNS configuration which Andreas Thienemann was kind enough to try and help me troubleshoot. In the end, I found a workaround and decided to come back to that later when I have time (ha!). In any case, thankfully the new replacement box is quite a bit faster than the old Athlon 1100 which was limping along before. So hopefully you’ll find this site a little more responsive, which is a nice side benefit.

Look at what’s hanging on my clothesline.

The interview I did with Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte is now up at the Twit.tv site. The FLOSS Weekly show is a very enjoyable podcast with top-notch production quality and two great hosts. I highly recommend it, if you haven’t heard it before.

Interestingly, Leo told me he is a long-time user of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for his professional work, so he had some particular questions about how RHEL and Fedora are related. I also got a chance to talk about the upcoming Fedora 11 release, the Anaconda storage rewrite, and our concentration on the upstream and what that means to Fedora users and the FOSS ecosystem.

Nominally back on the air.

I got the bare minimum of service back online, including my weblog, from a catastrophic HDD failure yesterday. That really threw a monkey wrench into my workday, I’m sorry to say! But thanks to a couple wonderful people including James Laska and Aristeu Rozanski, I’m back in business. Over the next week I guess I’ll see if I can’t use the opportunity to wangle this into a better overall server setup during my scant free time.

Because it wasn’t until the server died that I realized its backups were not ending up where I thought they were (yikes!), I have to reconstruct some of my old posts. Thankfully, a little Python and Google’s cache will probably suffice, although unless the lazyweb surprises me with something that doesn’t require as much work on my part, I’ll probably end up losing a few months’ worth of comments, which is sad because they were often very enjoyable to read. Please don’t take it personally if you see yours is gone — lost, but not forgotten!

I hope our contributors at the various FADs this weekend are enjoying themselves, and I’m looking forward to the FAD in Raleigh in a week or so. That will be the start of an incredibly packed month. After I return from four days in Raleigh, I’ll be home for about a day and a half; then heading to SELF in Clemson, SC over a weekend; then home again for a couple days until I go to Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR for about four and a half days; then a redeye back home, where I’ll be home for a day and a half before jetting out to Berlin for over a week, for LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin 2009.

Whew! By the time I’m home more or less for good, it will be June 29th and the month will have disappeared like a summer storm. July and August should be much less travel, thankfully. It’s only through the saintly patience of SupaWife that I can hope to come out of June 2009 alive and with all my various appendages intact.