Descending into technology hell

Underneath it all, I'm a techie through and through. Not just a dabbler (hmmm maybe that's questionable now), but a full on deep, deep techie.

I mean, I know more than is healthy for people about network protocols, and I don't mean knowing what TPC/IP means, I still know what SNA and SDLC were, how to trouble shoot Token Ring networks and the makeup of an ethernet packet, asynchronous wan traffic, Virtual Circuits and X25 the list oges on.

And I have always loved hardware, whether it's opening up a server and appreciating the engineering that has gone into it (hardware porn as we know it), or just building my own PCs (writing this on one)I have always been happy to roll my sleeves up and wield a screwdriver.

So it is galling to find myself getting deeper and deeper into the well of technical problems, with no light of inspiration coming on.

It all started with a NAS box, an HP Proliant Microserver to be precise. A really nice bit of kit. A 12" cube with a low power (15w) CPu, space for 4 full size drives up to 8gb ram, perfect. I thought I'd go with ZFS for the storage, so it made sense to use Solaris, in this case Nexentastor community edition, full on storage appliance class software.

This stuff works, other people have got it working, it shouldn't be a problem. Download an iso, burn it and install. It grinds along for an age, doesn't fail, just sort of grinds to a halt. Hmmmm. OK download again, recheck the md5, burn again - same result. Next, memcheck still nothing fails. Swap the cd drive, no joy, the flash, no joy, he memory, no joy, the disks, no joy. Hardware seems not to be a problem, install Ubuntu - it works.

Back to the drawing board, previous release? No. Other hardware? No. Another microserver? No.

Bloody stumped and run out of time, bearing in mind that I am doing this in hour/2 hour sprints late at night. Stalled for now.

If that wasn't bad enough, I have a crucial m4 SSD (I cannot express how much I love SSDs), which decides to stop working. Not permanently, oh no that would be too easy, no this would stop about an hour after booting. Hair duly torn out, I mean how can this happen, its solid state it works or it doesn't. Eventually this is tracked down to a sodding firmware issue that kicks in after 5000 hours or so. Crucial eventually admit this, but will not have a fix out for two whole weeks! Sh*t.

That's now two computers down, but at least I have my toshiba laptop, hah that's what I thought. It duly decides to screw me up more by finding rare and unusual ways of powering itself off. Its a great laptop, lightweight and powerful looks good and works well good keyboard lots to like really. But it decides that if you hold it by anywhere to the left of the keyboard it poweres down bigtime, the onky way to get it to power up again is by taking the battery out and replacing it.

all of a sudden I have no computers left, and the family are not happy. Not at all.

There you go, technology hell (lucky I had an old Acer Revo to keep the home front at bay...)