Keeping a low profile

Have I ever mentioned that I *hate* computers?

I loathe every godforsaken neutron in their scummy little components. I despise the very ground upon which they crash. I spit on their buggy old firmware.

OK, now that’s out of my system…had a very interesting problem with Windows XP profiles this week.

Spent part of Sunday puttering around on Barney BigBoy, my primary box (a Dell XPS desktop with terabytes of hard drive space, 4GB of memory with the latest patch of Windows XP on a mixed Ethernet/802.11g network–it’s the one I use for photo, Flash and dev work). The houselights flickered for just a sec, the power made a fizzle noise, and then I began noticing Barney was slowing down, dramatically.

Wasn’t just the FiOS connection, this was something else. With no other app in the taskbar, a single Microsoft Word document was abysmally slow, typeahead like molasses.

I see that every once in awhile, when I’ve been maxing out Barney’s resources for long periods of time and memory starts leaking. A good reboot usually fixes the problem, so I rebooted…and it hit the fan.

Logged in and got an error message: Dead profile. (sounds of drill-sergeant-like cussing in background)

Drat.

Time to begin the arduous process of creating a new profile, copying everything over, dumping the old profile, etc… Luckily I have a lovely little Seagate backup drive to make this easy. Rebooted into a new administrator profile, immediately encounter two problems:

1. I can’t get anywhere NEAR the old profile, even with simple sharing turned off.
2. The motor on my backup drive sputters and dies, leaving me completely without backup. (this is when you realize that the medieval son-father-grandfather backup policies actually make a lot of sense)

Damn.

Check the upstairs and studio computers, Windows Vista and Linux on the same network: They can see Barney and whatever’s on the new profile. They can’t find a trace of the old profile or the myriads of files it housed, even though they were shared out across the network (Barney did double duty as my NAS). Drop down to command line interface in Vista, same problem–no files and only limited access.

System Restore has been reset to zero on Barney; there appears to be nothing to restore earlier than the creation of the new profile, no matter which profile I’m using.

Double-damn.

Since there’s a lot of unaccounted-for space filled on Barney, there’s an excellent chance that the files (or most of them, anyway) are still there, just un-pointed to, but for some reason Windows XP won’t recognize them on the network.

I’m suddenly feeling cold; Barney was my primary backup for all computers on the network (and-ulp-stored about 10 years’ worth of photos). Yeah, yeah I bleed off onto DVDs, I have some redundancy…but my Linux server that hosted Apache and lost its power supply last year, I figured that since Barney was already carrying Exchange and a dual boot why not make it a triple boot and…uh-oh.

Triple-damn.

Head back downstairs to the odd man out, Freddie Mac, my MacBook Pro, and just for yuks, check Finder. There, gloriously, are Barney’s old files.

About six months earlier I’d needed to transfer some work files to Freddie, and being lazy I’d opened ALL Barney’s drives to Freddie for sharing instead of just the ones I needed. There are all my new site devs. My lab notes for glass sculptures. Old email records. Tax stuff. The book I’m writing.

Whew.

No idea why Freddie can still see them when Windows and Linux can’t, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I buy a new backup drive (the NAS I wanted is out of my price range at the moment, but Costco had a special on Maxtor USB 2.0s….) and for reasons that would make this an even longer post so I won’t enumerate, wind up with a wierd kinda bucket-brigade operation: I attach the backup to Barney using the new profile, link from Barney into Freddie Mac across the network, use that link to get to the files on Barney’s old profile, and pull them through to copy them safely onto the new backup drive.

Once I make sure the files are safe on the backup, I once again reach through Freddie and delete the old files, verify their absence…then copy them back to what’s essentially the same place, but with the new profile.

Kinda Rube Goldbergish, but it works. Midway through I get the bright idea to see if I can change security levels on the old profile by swapping over to Freddie’s iTerm app (which lets you enter Unix commands directly). After about an hour of screwing around (and swearing), the stubborn little profile gives in, opens up and I can suddenly log into it directly from Barney.

Gee. Wish I’d thought of that earlier. Turns out it probably wouldn’t have helped much–there’s still stuff I can’t see from XP even from inside the profile, when they’re clearly visible from Freddie–but at least I can finish my file transfers without all the rigamarole. I suspect that the open sharing with Freddie Mac probably had something to do with that old profile shutting me out, but hey–

So…at this point everything salvageable is backed up, the new profile is operating, and Barney’s back in business. There’s a big deadzone on his primary RAID that tells me I need to replace the drive soon, so just to be on the safe side I’ll spend part of the weekend zeroing out Barney, reconfiguring drives and building him back up from scratch. I’m giving serious consideration to pulling some of Barney’s hard drives out and making myself a new fileserver accessible from ALL computers on the network.

I have two copies of Windows Vista, fully licensed and sitting in my bookshelf, but neither will work with Barney–too many incompatible components.

Not sure what I’ve learned from all this, except that I purely love heterogeneous networks and it doesn’t pay to get lazy. And if someone says “Gosh, I’ll bet you keep better backups next time,” or “Gee, you could have solved that profile problem in five minutes if you’d just…”

I’ll have to kill ‘em. Really.

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