The heat a few weeks ago was too much for my SS5/170, at least for the two Seagate drives. I was greeted on my return from visiting friends over the 4th of July weekend by I/O errors during my nightly cron jobs. The drive containing the root slice showed intermittent errors. The data drive, which I had unmounted a couple of weeks before (I didn’t need the space anymore), was offline. Fortunately, I had made backups a few days before. Other than the errors from that weekend, everything kept humming so I had time to plan the replacement.

This afternoon I brought it down and discovered that my intended spare was no good. After some appropriate profanity, I committed the disks to the trash and looked around for another Sparc. My U60, which I had been using to play with Solaris and NetBSD- it’s great compiling things on such a fast machine- was otherwise idle so I moved it from my desk to the rack and whipped out the OpenBSD CDs. An hour later I had it up and running with all the old content restored.

It’s massive overkill for hosting this static vanity site. One nice thing is that it’s blissfully quiet compared to the wailing of the SS5. I have to scrounge up another disk drive for the SPARCstation and bring that back up to resume it’s duties. Probably after I get back from vacation.