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16 Jun ' 07:08
If yesterday was a relatively calm day, to-day we were greeted by misfortune upon misfortune. It started in the morning when our second RAID computer, which we had been using as a back-up while the other was being repaired, decided that it would be a convenient time to fail. We were suddenly stranded with nowhere to put our data.
While Omelan continued working on the first computer, I applied myself to the second. With some helpful emails from colleagues in North America, I was soon able to figure out how the system worked and roughly what was wrong with it. One of the drives in its RAID needed replacing, which I did. We suspect that the Seagate discs we have been using are the cause of our woes, so we have been switching to Western Digital.
It took a paragraph to write, but a few hours to solve, and it was mid-afternoon before this was all done. Omelan was well on his way to bringing the other computer up, meanwhile. The RAID takes a few hours to repair itself when a new disc is added, so we headed to the mountain while we had the chance. Just before leaving, the fuse in one of our important transformers blew, cutting our internet gateway machine off of the network. We didn't have any spares that we knew of in town, so resolved to bring some down from the site.
At the site we did the checklist as quickly as we could, but were waylaid by the grease sprayer on our telescope azimuth gears. It had gotten cold enough that one of the gauges was frozen solid. We stayed a bit longer to test that the grease was actually flowing, which it did seem to be, albeit grudgingly. We turned up the thermostat on its heater and left, though we will have to check it again to-morrow.
As we drove down, we decided that we needed to purchase some beer, and we stopped at our regular grocery store to pick some up. Then back to nurse our computers to health.
Mine seemed to be doing well until about midnight, when it failed just before the repair was done. I have restarted it to continue through the night, and will see if I can keep copying data down from the mountain in the meantime, where the discs are filling up fast. As for me, I shall sleep.
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