Thursday started out nicely. Jeff was in town, the weather was pleasant, and we got to the office at a decent hour.

I need to be in Europe for three weeks, so I was looking forward to getting things ready at the office, heading home early afternoon to pack, watching “The Big Bang” theory and going to bed.

It wasn’t to be.

One of our Mac minis, marvin, died. No biggie, he’s not a critical machine, but rarely have I had Apple hardware just die. It won’t even POST (power on self test). Jeff was also in the process of migrating mrscrabtree (our phone system) from his older donated desktop to a new, more powerful rack mount server.

I’m really happy that after seven years we are moving away from piecemeal hardware and other hand-me-downs to real servers. We even have a little Dell rack to put it all in. Since we’re getting all official, I decided to install Dell’s OpenManage software on our servers.

For the most part it went smoothly, but on themole, an older 2650 that hosts a number of virtual machines, it told me that the RAID controller firmware was out of date. The upgrade process seemed easy, so I decided to go for it, and it went without a hitch.

Playing with my new visibility into the hardware, I noticed that the RAID array did not have a hot spare (it’s five drives with four of them in RAID-5). When I set the unused drive as the spare, it threw a error saying that it wasn’t big enough. The problem is that we have four drives from one vendor that format to 136.8GB and one from another that formats to 137.0GB, and I believed that was causing the issue.

It let me set the drive as a spare anyway, but when I went into the server room there was a “Drive Fail” message on the LCD console. Being the anal retentive sod I am, I wanted to fix that, so I figured that if I pulled the odd drive out, the array would reinitialize with the spare and then I could just put it back in and set that as the spare.

Sounds good on paper.

So I pulled the drive and the array started to heal itself. This was a slow process but it seemed to be going smoothly.

That was deceiving.

I had shut down the three VM guest on this machine but then the host O/S started to throw disk errors. I decided to reboot to the RAID controller to let it finish unmolested, and when I got to the progress screen it showed it slowly rebuilding. I didn’t worry about it until I saw it go from “Rebuilding 10%” to “Dead”.

Wha?

Something got out of whack and the array died. (sigh)

There was nothing left to do but reinitialize everything and reinstall. Of course we didn’t have any backups, but the one VM that was running the database for our demo server was new, and I was able to grab the old Supermicro server that used to host it and put it back into service. Needless to say I didn’t get home until about 8pm (but, dammit, all my lights were blue and error free).

I made dinner and we decided to watch “Bridesmaids” (meh – not as funny as I was led to believe). One of Andrea’s coworkers had just bought the DVD but we had to get it back the next day. I decided to get a Klondike bar from the freezer for dessert, and when I bit into it, runny ice cream spilled out onto my shirt.

The refrigerator had died.

By this time it is about 10pm, I’m not packed or even close to being ready to leave for three weeks, and now Andrea is put into the position to replace the refrigerator on her own.

Now, I give up a lot for my business, but I was not about to leave her without a fridge for all that time, or make her replace it on her own. So I called American, and for an amount of money bordering on extortion I was able to move my flights out one day, and then I stayed up until 2am researching appliances.

On Friday we started off by going to Lowes. Not only is one close, they have stock for same day pickup (everywhere else we looked needed at least a day to deliver). The guy called it “one for show and one to go”.

This is when we hit our next problem. Our house was built in 1991, and refrigerators were shorter then. All of the cool new ones are too tall.
Finally, we have a white kitchen and white kitchens are not “in” now. Everything is stainless steel. While I don’t have a problem with stainless steel, by the time I’m ready to sell my farm I am certain white will be back in fashion, so I’m not eager to change.

Anyway, I found a refrigerator that would work. It was a highly rated Whirlpool bottom freezer with a standard door. The problem was that Andrea didn’t like how the ice maker worked (it was down in the freezer drawer and you have to bend over to get to it).

Now, all of the fancy units with ice in the door were too tall, not to mention expensive. I thought we were stuck until Andrea pointed out that I had been measuring from the front of the appliance (where the hinges are) but that part would not need to fit under the cabinet. When I measured behind the hinges, it was right at the height to fit.

I had also not measured the height with a lot of precision (turns out I was dead on, but I didn’t know that) nor did I check to see if there was some space under the cabinet that could be cut out if needed, or if the cabinet came all the way down. So we headed back home.

I also started searching online for this Samsung refrigerator that Andrea was thinking about buying. It too was highly rated, but with French doors and two drawers, LED lighting, ice and water on the door, etc. It looked like HH Gregg carried them, so I called to ask about stock.

It turns out that the store in Briar Creek in Raleigh had a scratch and dent unit on sale. We hopped in the truck and headed out there.

The dents were minor, but they were willing to drop over $700 off the price. Sold.

Now we just had to get it home and installed. Did I mention it was raining?

The HH Gregg folks wrapped it up in plastic wrap and helped me get it on the truck. I made it home without having an accident and called my neighbor Jake. Jake is amazing with stuff like this, so he was more than willing to help out. Plus he has a nice, small tractor with forks on his front end loader which made getting the refrigerator in the house much easier.

We moved the old unit out of the way and got the new one installed. It did require that we cut out a bit of the cabinet, but I think it looks fine.

Add a couple of refrigerator magnets and you can’t even tell there are dents in it.

Finished all that up about 6pm, which left me just enough time to replace the light over the barn, run to the dump, and to visit the office to finish restoring a few more servers that had died. Grabbed dinner, I packed, and I got to bed about midnight, ready to be up at 5am to head to the airport.