Up and running again late in December 2011

Sorry for the nearly two week absence. This web server’s 10 year old hard drive developed too many faults between December 9th and 10th, and the system became rather useless. The wonky hard drive was replaced with a brand new one this week. Nothing important got lost thanks to AMANDA and a fair number of backup tapes. Eventually the server will be restored to its former glory.

However, a new and fast server is in the works, possibly with a mirrored ZFS root pool on 2 drives and a ZFS raidz1 data pool on 3 drives. I doubt I can make the switch before sometime in early or mid January 2012.

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

By the way, those of you who are geared towards computer science might want to watch Don Knuth‘s 17th Annual Christmas Tree Lecture entitled “Bayesian Trees and BDDs“.