I’m moving home.
The flights are booked — Feb 14th, Valentine’s Day, I’ll be leaving Orange County and heading back to Dublin permanently. In the meantime, I’ve been selling stuff, throwing stuff out, decommissioning servers, and making backups.
The server
My erstwhile desktop, later my trusty back-room server, ‘jalapeno’, was sold earlier today. Thankfully, I bought a 250GB hard drive recently, so I actually had the room to back up its 70GB somewhere beforehand.
Being security-conscious, I overwrote its partitions using pseudo-random data before passing it on (‘dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda9 bs=1024k’). However, being lazy, I did this while the machine was up and running, over an SSH link.
Watching as ‘df’ produced gibberish output, and as later commands started producing nothing but bus errors, was odd — a very strange feeling to be actively destroying the disk’s data like that. Here’s hoping the backups worked…
The yard sale
We had one, in the process selling about $1000 worth of IKEA furniture, books, camping equipment, bits of hardware, sports equipment, and a pink xmas tree:
The local bargain hunters starting knocking on the door at 8:15am, despite the sign’s posted start time of 9am. Once we did start bringing items out to the front lawn to sell, there were already about 10 people, which quickly swelled to a mob of 20 by 8:45am. They were keen!
By the end of Saturday, we’ve sold pretty much all the furniture, all of the sports and camping equipment, most of the hardware that isn’t total crap, and only 2 of the books. One shopper’s explanation: ‘she didn’t have the time to read books’.
Still, the yard sale has netted $345. Not bad, and a good feeling to de-clutter so successfully.