Are you the kind of ‘early adopter’ that loves to have non-consumer grade kit in your house?
Do you have PC based devices in your house to perform chores that embedded devices usually do?

If you answered ‘yes’ to either of the questions above then you understand the pain that is in my household currently.

In a revious post I postulated the woes of losing a raid 5 array and the heartache that goes along with the sick to the stomach feeling that you have lost years worth of accumaleted entertainment data.

It has been two weeks now, and I am pretty much no closer to having my 4 hoe systems back together again.

My systems….

1. Server with 1TB raid 5 array.

 This is a linux based machine that has my storage, a DTV Tuner card, MythTV backend for scheduling and recording of TV, CRON jobs for my websites to action scripts automatically, and shared backup for the home network.

2. TV and Movie frontend in the lounge, streams content from the server

3. TV and Movie frontend in the theatre, streams content from the server

4. TV and Movie frontend in the bedroom, streams content from the server
Losing the array meant not only the loss of the data, but also the loss of the machine.
I have no rebuilt it, re-installed mythtv and got the tv functions going again, however without the array functioning I dont have any storage, so the TV recording isnt being used.

The backend going down meant that the TV and Movie frontends stopped functioning.
Due to a change of software on the backend I felt that it was best to upgrade the software on the fronends too.
Lounge frontend has now got a hardware error of the CD, preventing me from being able to install.
I should have fixed that by tonight with a boot USB key, time will tell.

The backend machine has lost the USB bus and it isnt coming back it seems, so I had to take up valuable PCI space to put in a USB/Firewire card.

The array isnt working properly, taking 12 hours so far to rebuild 7%.

The bottom line,  I think that I am losing my ability to appreciate PC based solutions and long for an embedded consumer solution.

This realisation came at about 8pm sunday night when I had been sitting at the lounge tv trying to do a reinstall for the nth time and my wife mentioned, how much time would you have to other things if none of these systems existed?

That is a very good idea.

If we didnt have to spend whole weekends struggling to try and fix computers, how much extra time would we have to spend with our families or do more productive tasks?

In my case of the last 2 weeks and more than likely with one more to go, that will be approximately 5 x 12 hour days, so 60 hours, assuming that I can get it fixed in another day.

That is an aweful lot of time to have up your sleeve.

I dont really beleive it though, I doubt that most people in the same boat could not have a PC in the house, or not power some enthusient device by PC.

I know that I cant.