She's here....

The newest edition to our family has arrived.

This is Enya ...

It's been a hard day !

If in doubt, find a foot and sit on it.

 She's very people orientated, and if she starts to get unsure or worried will find a foot to sit on. She also likes going to sleep on feet, probably because you can't sneak off.

Meeting the residents ...

Enya with Kira

Enya with Becky

She's has been sniffed and growled at. Mostly when trying to stand on top of Becky and when she tried to nibble Kira's foot. However all went well as she is quite respectful of large dogs when they growl. Heather's excellent pack socialisation is showing through and stopping problems already.

The Caged Beast

It a tuggy ... but I need my beauty sleep ...

She's survived the first night and so did we :-) She went to sleep after 10mins howling, but woke up at 6:30 literally as I was putting on my trousers to go down and check on her. 'Cos she started howling  I couldn't go downstairs and say "Hi" - you have to wait until their quiet so they don't associate the noise with your return.

She's met our vet who thought she was lovely, and was very complimentary about her human socialisation. No nasty jabs this time, they like them to have a week to settle in before they do anything, this was just a physical which she passed with flying colours :-)

She's snoozing in her crate at the moment, hence I've been able to write this, but I'm expecting she'll explode out of the crate any minute. The door's not closed so she can wake up, romp out and not feel frustrated :-)

Only 5 more sleeps ....

... until the newest member of the family arrives.

 This is Enya (Kilnhurst Cadhla) and she's a Border Collie.

She's been breed by a very good friend of ours. We haven't actually met her yet, as unfortunately she's several hundred miles away and a few snow drifts away at the moment, but we've known the mother, the grandmother and the rest of the Kilnhurst clan for a very long time. We're looking forward to a very entertaining and fast time :-)

The will be our second puppy (and third dog in the household). I guess it's a bit like a second kid, having been through the process once already, there's a lot less unknowns and of course you won't make the same mistakes you made the first time .... this time it'll be different! This time we'll make a whole bunch of new mistakes :-)

As the saying goes - watch this space ...

Recovery Stress (Part 2 of Christmas Crashes)

Recovery of the AV File Server took longer than expected (click here for part 1 of this saga) - to start with it took 6 days to get the replacement motherboard which was pretty good considering it was Christmas and it shipped and delivered in the 3 working days between then and New Year.

So new motherboard arrives, an Intel D510MO Fanless Dual Core Atom Mini-ITX. At this point it should just be a matter of dropping it into the AV File Server, connecting it up original disk, firing it up and letting Plug'n'Play sort out the drivers. Looking forward to everything being sorted in an hour or two. Ho, ho, ho.

The new motherboard won't talk to the existing disk. It goes through POST but then hangs. The disk has been working perfectly in another machine so the disk is OK.

OK, it's a mini-ITX board so perhaps the PSU isn't delivering enough power for this particular motherboard and disk combination.

"Borrow" a PSU from another machine to test that theory - nope it's not the PSU, the motherboard still doesn't like the disk.

OK, try a couple of other disks. Yep, the new motherboard likes all of those, so it just this particular combination that's causing the problem.

Right, next thought, clone the existing disk on to a new hard drive that we know the motherboard likes. We do have a spare 1TB disk but at the moment it's in the Drobo waiting to be upgraded. OK, replace the 1TB drive in the Drobo with a new, larger 2TB drive. Wait for the Drobo to rebuild it's array. Don't want to use the 1TB drive we've taken out just in case the rebuild goes pear shaped and we have to put the original drive back into the Drobo. The rebuild takes 24 hours, but is successful - hooray, something is going our way at least.

Hook the 1TB drive up to a machine with the existing disk from the AV File Server and kick off the cloning process. It hangs part way through. Doh! Try again.... nope, it hangs again in the same place. Fiddlesticks and other such words. New motherboard doesn't like the original disk and apparently we can't clone the data onto a new drive.

OK, decided to just bite the bullet and re-install the O/S on the AV File Server using the new 1TB drive. Start the Windows 2003 Server installation process, all goes well until the second reboot when it's trying to install the drivers for the devices it detects. It hangs. Rats. Try again, same result. OK, it's an original installation disk so it might be a lack of device drivers or out of date ones. Download SP2 for W2003 and slipstream that and the motherboard's device driver into a new installation disk. Try again. Nope, same problem.

OK, the new motherboard is not certified for W2003, perhaps for good reason given the problems we're having.

Right we already have the same type of motherboard, an Intel D510MO, running Windows 7 on a different machine. Decide to clone the drive from that machine onto the new 1TB drive and try that. Also decide at this point as we're going with a new motherboard, new disk, new O/S, we might as well go the whole hog and get a new case/PSU. That way it'll be a completely new machine. Fortunately one of the local shops has a suitable mini-ITX case that'll fit in the rack.

Clone the Windows 7 drive ..... finally, success, it clones, hooray.

Assemble the new AV File Server, with it's new motherboard, new disk, new case/PSU and press the power button. HOORAY, it boots. On the home stretch now. Just need to update the serial number of the O/S to a new license, load the software it needs, and attach the Drobo. All of which takes another day of course :-(

Finally we have a running AV File Server again .... total time: 9 days. While I very happy that it's all working again, I could scream - nothing huge went wrong, and we didn't lose a single byte of data, but nothing about the recovery went smoothly and it chewed up a huge amount of time over Christmas. Not to mention the frustration. Could we have made it any quicker - probably not, the only way I can think of, would have been to start building a new machine immediately and I really didn't want that expense just after Christmas.

Anyway Happy New Year to everyone !!

A New Year and A New Arrival ...

A New Year and we have a new arrival :-)

Her name is Ausdan Amber Angel and she's a 6 month old Norwegian Fjord Horse

She arrived on New Year's Eve from Wales ... fashionably late. She was supposed to be here before Christmas, but several feet of snow and then a good thick coating of ice delayed her departure. So she finally arrived the day before yesterday, a little bewildered and very unsure about her new home. However a new field of fresh grass, a bale of hay, and especially a large grey Welsh Cob/Arab mare for company (and to hid behind) she seems to be settling in. After sticking like glue to Becky (the aforementioned Welsh Cob/Arab) she's now starting to investigate fields and people and started doing little foal canters round the field. We're confidentially looking forward to her becoming a little madam .... I mean charmer :-)

Christmas Crashes and Other Tales

Another year, other Christmas. Technically it was even a White Christmas ... technically? Well it didn't actually snow on the day, but there was still plenty of white stuff still on the ground from earlier in the week.

A Christmas Dog Walk!

However it wasn't all tinsel, turkey and presents - with an absolutely immaculate sensing of timing our AV File Server (Audio Visual) decided to crash on Christmas morning. Well it didn't so much crash as die ... completely, utterly and irretrievably. I was adding some extra storage to it and this required a reboot. Everything was going smooth and by the numbers, until the server didn't restart after the reboot. Some fairly rapid and frenzied diagnoses later it was determined that its motherboard was completely kaput. For those in the know, not even beep codes. Ho hum.

Open heart surgrey on a mini-ITX server

 If it was mid-year you could get a replacement motherboard next day, however given it's Christmas and half the country is buried in snow, the earliest we can get a replacement here is Thursday :-(

For once I can feel fairly smug at this point as all the data was backuped before I started and anyway it sits on an external storage array - a Drobo (www.drobo.com).

The Drobo temporarilty sat on a desk

So the Drobo was moved from the rack to a temporary home on the office desk and hooked up to one of the desktop machines. This was renamed and re-IPed so, like Clark Kent emerging from a phone box, it's now masquerading as the AV server. Serenity, films, photos and music, has been restored to the household.

So the moral of this Christmas Tale? - Always backup your data!  This was just an annoying inconvenience for us, which ate a bit of time. It could have been much, much worse; the data on this server is all our digital photos (~50,000), music and various home movies. A thousand, thousand memories. I know you never think it will happen to you, but one day it will. PCs break, disks corrupt, CDs and DVDs fade. Remember, data isn't real until it exists in at least two places, so always, ALWAYS, have a backup.

So a final thought for Christmas - where does the rise of the mobile phone and the subsequent demise of the phone box leave Superman? Caught short and exposed? Don't let your data be ;-)

Merry Christmas!

Snuggle Dogs

Collies and Labradors are very different dogs. One was breed to herd sheep and is very good at it. The other was breed to swim and is also very good at it. They're also both very good at snuggling ... but they do it in very different ways.

Our Collie likes to drape herself across people. And of course being a collie she does it 100%!

Our Labrador also likes to snuggle but prefers to sit beside rather than drape.

How small can you curl?

An Illrador :-(

Thursday morning started very early for us, with Kira whining to be let out in the garden at 3am. I imagine this is a bit like being a parent. You get woken up by an unusual noise, your subconscious registers what it is and gets the feet going before the conscious mind has caught up. I was physically out the bedroom door before I was really awake. It's very unusual for Kira to make any kind of noise in the night so whatever was causing it was fairly serious. Sure enough, when let out, she emptied the contents of stomach and came back in looking a bit sorry for herself.

Now having a Labrador, she will "snack" when out for a walk if she finds something she thinks is tasty, so this happens from time to time. It's not something that causes too much worry, but I did spend the rest of the night on the sofa in case she needed to go out again. By the time the sun came out she seemed fine and was bouncy on the morning walk, chasing a ball with her normal gusto.

Unfortunately it being a week day we had to go to work but Andie came back to walk her at lunch time and again she seemed fine. I managed to get back at 4:30pm to be greeted by a depressed Labrador and some very watery vomit by the back door. When let out into the garden she added diarrhoea to the list of symptoms. At that point you start thinking about a visit to the vets. I debated this with myself for 30mins, but what swung it was not physical symptoms, it was the very depressed Labrador who followed me round the house and tried to hide under the bed. Our collie often hides under the bed. Any fireworks and all you can see is a black and white bum sticking out from the underside of the bed, but not the Labrador and yet here I was looking at a very sad black nose poking out from beneath the bed. After that she tried to sit on my feet while I sat at the desk. Definitely time to call the vets. That was 5 o'clock, by 5:20 we were in the vets and Kira was having her stomach poked and prodded. At this point she obliged by demonstrating her diarrhoea. So an anti-nausea injection, a course of anti-biotics, a recommendation of a rice & chicken diet and £62 lighter we left the vets.

Back home, some sofa time was prescribed. The seriousness of the situation was confirmed by Kira's reaction to suppertime.

This is not the normal reaction of a Labrador to the supper call.

She also seemed to be a bit chilly so she was blanketed.

A chilly Labrador

Fortunately dogs bounce back more quickly from these things than we do so by Friday evening we were back to a bouncy Labrador who was hinting that supper would be a wonderful idea.

So what was the point of this rambling? Having been down with food poisoning myself earlier in the year I struggled through 3 or 4 days before crawling into the doctor. And yet as soon as one of the animals is ill they're straight to the vets. Why? Me suffering is through choice (or stupidity), their suffering is not and we want to relieve it as quickly as possible and sod the expense - that's what credit cards are for!