The Rise Of The Office

The time has finally come to resurrect my old office from Mountain View. I put my desk together Monday evening and then set about unpacking my computers and turning them back on after nigh on six months of disuse. My file server happily whirred into action, using the new power cord I purchased from Media Markt on Saturday.

My workstation, however, was a different story. The dreaded click of death familiar to anyone who has ever lost a hard drive in active duty defiled my ears with its filthy rattle. My heart sank. I knew immediately what this meant.

That’s what can happen when a hard drive kept in constant use for months on end is suddenly spun down, packed into a box, shipped across the Atlantic in God knows what kind of temperatures, kept in storage for months in God knows what kind of temperatures, then plucked from a box months later, connected to the mains and optimistically called back from its slumber as if nothing had ever happened. Some drives can’t take that kind of abuse and give up the ghost. Mine was one of them. Most of the stuff on there had been backed up, anyway. My home directory was networked from jiskefet, which was, itself, backed up before leaving the US.

In short, this isn’t a disaster, but it is a major irritation, because now I have to install Linux again from scratch on my workstation. That means compiling a bunch of local programs, too.

So, I had to go out Tuesday morning to buy a new hard drive. I picked up a 400 Gb Maxtor from MyCom on the Ceintuurbaan. I also bought a USB 2.0 and Firewire card to put in jiskefet, the file-server. That machine is also used for making back-ups to the external hard drive that I purchased a few days before our departure from the US. I had noticed back then that making these back-ups was painfully slow and it turned out that its USB ports were only USB 1.1 devices. I should have bought a USB 2.0 PCI card and fitted it there and then, but there were so many things to do in those last few days that it never happened. Anyway, jiskefet now has such a card fitted. I’ll connect the external hard drive to it tomorrow.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’ve fitted my workstation with the new 400 Gb drive and started to reinstall the operating system, but it’s a slow process, choosing all those packages and the like. I’m putting Fedora Core 4 back on it, even though 5 will be out in a few days. Friends are currently raving about Ubuntu, but I don’t have time to look into a new distro at this point in time.

Another thing happening on Tuesday was that the electricians came back to complete the Ethernet work they had begun for me. I can now happily report that the house is currently wired with CAT5 in most rooms. Wireless 802.11 is all well and good, but sometimes one wants the stability and security of a wired connection. Besides, more and more household appliances can be connected to a network these days, so it’s good to have ports in most rooms.

I also had to buy a new mouse, because the old cordless one I was using had a power adapter that couldn’t handle 220V. Anticipating this kind of thing, I had bought a voltage converter at Fry’s before leaving California, but the shape of the adapter plug meant I couldn’t plug it into the voltage converter. Doh!

To fix the problem, I bought myself a Logitech G7 mouse. This doesn’t plug into the mains at all. Instead, its base station charges battery packs that then slide into the mouse. The base station is powered by one of the PC’s USB ports. It’s a great mouse, but there was nothing wrong with the old one. It would have been sufficient to purchase a Logitech 220V adapter, but, of course, no-one sells those separately.

I hope to find the time to finish installing my workstation tomorrow, at which point I can begin configuring the system again. With a little luck, I’ll be able to stop the day’s other chores from getting in the way.