I haven’t had a bad day in a long while now.

Every so often they creep in, screw up a bunch of things, and then just slowly fade away. Unless you count that one September, when I was in college, where the whole month was like one very long bad day…

But I digress.

This post is about today. And today is so bad, it started yesterday. At some point in the evening (maybe around 6pm or so), I heard a beep from my server rack. An odd beep, one that I vaguely remember being from my keyboard switch. I logged into my server, the trusty luggage01, and found that it had just rebooted. Strange, I thought, but I kept doing my thing. After all, this server has been on and plugging away for six and a half years now. The most downtime it’s had in all those years was about a week, when I was moving from Florida to Maine. Every other time it was down was no longer than a single day. In my new residence, luggage01 has been on since Paul and I moved in, back in June 2011.

“It’s a beast,” I’ve said many times. “That thing’s like a cockroach. It’ll be on until the end of time!”

Famous last words.

This morning, it was off. The light on the front was on, but the server was definitely off. And Mondays are my days for running backups. Fitting, eh? Fortunately for me, I back my data up religiously, so my worst case scenario is losing one week of work. But I can’t very well go ahead with new work when I don’t have my server for all the functionality it provides. Which leaves me with the only choice: to fix the server (and oh how I hate IT work). I had some errands to run, so I proceeded to drive all the way to the bank and post office (about twenty minutes), only to realize that I had forgotten to bring the keys I needed to get into my safety deposit box and post office box. Wonderful.

So I drove all the way home. Rather than turning around and driving all the way back, I decided to brew some coffee and start working on the server. Apparently there’s a leak in my coffee pot. Wasn’t there yesterday, but today it definitely is there. Half the water I poured into the reservoir ended up all over the countertop. So instead of my normal three cups of coffee (I use big cups; about seven cups of water), I ended up with about one and a half very strong cups of coffee. Yummy, actually. But not at all what I intended.

Next I took my server downstairs, into the garage, and sprayed about seven months’ worth of dust out of it. I checked the capacitors on the motherboard and they looked fine. No bulging caps, nothing burst. I’ve had that happen with more recent boards, but I guess Intel uses good components in their motherboards. Any electronics that can last seven years of active use and still be in good shape is a winner in my book. I did a quick sniff test. No stench of burnt electronics. Near as I can tell, I think the power supply failed. But it didn’t fail epicly, it didn’t burst into flames or melt down or anything. It just sort of said “eh…” and died. That’s probably thanks to another good electronics provider - Antec.

Luckily I have spare parts (actually four entire spare computers) so I can replace the power supply and see what happens. But part of me is scared, as always, that I’m just inviting more disaster.

The way this day has been going so far… I have a dentist appointment in about two hours.

And I’m looking forward to it.