Well, if anyone has checked by recently they have noticed that this site has been messed up.

The story is that it locked up one fine afternoon and I wrote it off to overheating as that had happened before. I then figured out that I had been hit with the IBM DeskStar problem. IBM's DeskStar line of hard drives was so unreliable that they sold the business to Hitachi. I opened the spare drive that I had laying around and it too was the exact same model. It should work for a few days, right? WRONG! It died by the next night. Further it turns out that after I bought new Maxtor drives I was still having problems so it actually was a combo of bad drives and a bad IDE controller on the motherboard.

People who know me know that ever couple of years I have the ability for about 5 days to break every piece of electronics I touch...

I've rebuilt my main server six or seven times. The real lame part was that I couldn't get a backup of the html directory off before the original drive finally gave up. I was able to get all email, home directories, and conf files though.

Luckily I found a backup from the end of last year and combined that with Google's cache to completely rebuild hoffmang.com. The only thing that is missing are a few comments. I actually have the text, I just have to figure out how to add them.

There is still some rebuilding of CarolinaPacific.org and Heather's Huzzah to do as well as re-publishing some photos in my online galleries, but I'm almost fully rebuilt. The only things permanently gone are a perl script and some data I was collecting in the interim.

A word of warning. This machine is an old Pentium II 233mhz box, so things may be a little slow around here until I complete the return process on the offending motherboard.

Sigh...