I got back from my trip to Singapore and Australia late last night. Thanks to the joys of a seven hour time difference (_and_ the fact that the UK came out of daylight savings time overnight) I was up at 5am this morning trying to download my email.
I'd decided to turn all my computers off when I went away. Previously at least one of them (the firewall box) hadn't been turned off for at least three months. All this means that the first task was turning everything on again.
Most of the computers woke up again without any problems, but the firewall box started making very strange noises and refused to boot. Further investigation revealed that the boot disk had broken.
Luckily, being just a firewall, there's nothing important on the box so I just needed to buy a replacement hard disk and reinstall Linux. Whilst I was at PC World, I decided to buy Red Hat 8.0 as well and give that a go.
So, a few hours later I was back on the web and downloading a few thousand pieces of email. Amongst them were a few discussing the fact that $employer hasn't been able to pay any of its staff this month.
All in all, I far prefer being on holiday :)
