Whiz, Clack Clack Clack, Whiz!
Another hard drive bites the dust. It looks like it’s been hanging around a while… the last drive that it looks like I replaced in my trusty dusty firewall was in 2005… can that be? Hmm. It’s possible I guess. It’s the main drive for my firewall. No Operating System, no internet access. No nothing. I pull out my trusty box of old hard drives and look for a promising candidate. A 2g drive!
Of course I skipped a step or two. First thing I did was pull the firewall off the shelf that it sits on above my head. When I pulled the cover off I noticed a note written in permanent marker warning me that this CD drive has intermittent read errors. Aha… that’s the problem. I hadn’t been able to get the firewall completely up to date with the latest version of NetBSD because the CD drive was crapped out. Now it’s time to pull the old drive out and put it in the “Quality Connections pile”.
The same shelf as the firewall holds a stack of CD drives. I try them one by one to find one that doesn’t keep ejecting (BIOS issue?) all on its own. Then to the aforementioned box of hard drives. While I’m browsing the aisles, I look for faster NICs – that whole cable internet thing chewing at the back of my mind. And yes, like any true geek, I have aisles of old computer crap. Or at least shelves. I pulled a couple of D-Link 10/100 NICs from the shelf. They are marked DFE-530TX and DFE-530TX+. I vaguely recall recovering them from (Windows) computers they failed in. Like the pack rat that I am, I kept them. I pulled the 10Base-T cards, 3 Com Etherlink III NICs from the firewall and replaced them with the 10/100 D-Links.
A quick install of NetBSD 5.0.2 and I was ready to start figuring out all of my now gone configurations. It has taken a day of futzing around just to get the home network back online, but I’m there. I now have to remember what all of my customizations were and how to recreate them. Maybe this time I’ll make a backup copy of the configuration files, or not. I only seem to have to perform the Lazarus trick every five years or so.



