Well, my webserver has been dead to the world for the last couple of days and unfortunately there was nobody there to reset it for me until today. It seems that my nice, new 10K RPM 9GB Ultra-SCSI drive may be on the way out 
There was a collection of SCSI errors in the log, so as far as I can tell this was probably what caused the machine to die. That’s a great shame because the drive is ultra-fast and so it contains 90% of the filesystem… For now I’ve just written a quick backup script to back stuff up onto another machine, so if it does go at least there’ll be backups of everything.
And now, my tiny problem pales into insignificance. As most people will no doubt have seen in the news, there was a fire in an underground cable duct in central Manchester early on Monday morning (just up the road from me in fact). As a result, 130,000 landlines are (still) down, the ambulance service (at least) have lost radio communications, a few ISPs have lost routes and a few of the mobile networks are dead too. The remaining mobile networks which are working are naturally under heavy load so that makes life difficult. Personally, I’ve been completely unaffected by this. My internet connection is still very much alive and I’ve had no problems making or receiving mobile calls – being on Three, who have the least subscribers of any UK network, does (sometimes) have some advantages.
But apart from all that, the weather’s been great in Manchester today. According to Evolution the temperature was 13′c this afternoon – and after the winter we’ve just had, that felt quite tropical! Conversely, my parents have just got back from Spain where there’s been lots of rain, floods, landslides and snow. Haha!
Now that the server is back up, I can continue developing my new website to replace this one. I’ve now got all the pages into it and it’s basically finished. I just need to do an index page and the navigation bar then I can chuck it into use. I’ve just got one slight annoyance which occurs when the page content is shorter than the side-box. Then the footer goes underneath the floating side-box and doesn’t look right (its width is set to 100%, but it obviously doesn’t account for floating objects).
