The patient is healthy but dead

Three weeks ago I was scanning in all our old analog pictures from the APS cartridge. I've found a nice guy who rents out an APS capable scanner in .nl.

While I was scanning this in on Adele (my iMac) I thought: let's reconfigure Frost (the Debian build machine, backup server, iTunes server and fileserver), so I did a final backup to a FW external HD and inserted a Debian net-install CD. Which failed to install.

A bit confused I tried an older Debian release, which got slightly farther, but it still failed with a write error. So in the end I booted a recent Ubuntu installer, apt-getted the smart utilities and got a report on the disk. The disk claimed it was healthy. However it used 100% of its replacement sectors and gave read errors all over the place. Oh and a write error on sector several sectors.

Lessons learned:

1. Ask for smart support in the Debian installer
2. Install the smart daemon on the next server

So now I'm looking round for a nice Q6600 based server, using an intel motherboard with buildin graphics (maximum Linux compatibility) 4GB ram and 1TB of disk. This turns out to be a problem. None of the big vendors want to sell me a powerful, silent, computer with only Intel buildin graphics, they all insist on throwing in some nVidia or ATI incompatible POS :-(. And the smaller companies all want to sell me 'Gamer' PCs, with the same POS cards. So I have to find somebody who will build to spec but will still give me some warranty...

Not having Frost means that I am not able to do any Debian uploads :-(. Not that I'm not buzzy: I've got 3000 pictures to name, tag and date... (and in some case reimport because iPhoto things that they are raw pictures instead of the 48 bit tiff images that they are)