the many lives of ryan.net

Welcome to my first entry for Forced March, the "you better blog every day in March" challenge invented by Beth, and participated in (poorly) by a bunch of our friends.

Day one, and I'm 100%!

Anyway, the blahg story for the day: I was back in NYC/NJ for about 11 days last month, for a planned visit to friends, and to Maggie's parents, which got pushed forward for business (client work), and then pushed back as well, such that my employer ended up paying for my whole flight (plus all the change fees), and that Maggie (who's a great sport about this stuff) ended up flying alone both ways. At least she didn't get stuck in a middle seat this time, 'cause I plan for that scenario now.

While out in NJ, I'd arranged to pick up my old ryan.net server from the place where it used to live, since that place was a server co-location facility that was in lower Manhattan, during hurricane Sandy. Maybe you've heard of it, it was a giant thing that about drowned the biggest city in America.

Anyway, the weeks during and after Sandy, my tireless ISP tried to keep stuff running, through several power outages, and tales (relayed over twitter) of carrying diesel fuel through the dark stairwells in buckets, to power the generator. When they could find diesel.

This all apparently was "just about enough of that crap", though, since a month or two later, I got an email saying that they were basically selling my business to another place, and going for a drink of something other than storm sewer water.

So, I wished them well, and said "you only need to migrate the one server... there's another there from before that was just the migration host", to which they replied they'd store the other out in New Jersey, where I could pick it up later. Cool.

Flash forward to last week, when I got there, and as I parked, I got the email "hey... um... we can't find your server, we maybe threw it out... we could give you a similar host, though."

I said I'd be right up in a minute, and look to see if I recognized my host. Which, I did.

I found the host on their racks, and thought, "yay!"... but then noticed the disks were pulled out of it, and they had piles of disks nearby. Apparently a *lot* of their customers just said "never mind, it's not worth shipping it back"...

I was a pretty good sport about it, and they gave me *two* replacement disks of a similar size. I can't help but wonder what somebody who found my old disk and tried to read it would make of it. It's got old email and stuff on there, but I doubt they'll be able to find it.

It's got no bootable OS on the disk (boot media was usb) ... then it's a (relatively) weird disk format that most tools don't support. And *then* it's a volume inside that, running a super-old OS, inside a (relatively) weird hypervisor.

It's like somewhere out there, my old email and blog data is in the 4th level of "Inception", waiting for me to kick the chair out from under it.

What'd be a real trip is if the random disks they gave me had my data on 'em. I'll let you know if I end up trying to read what's on *those*.