So, this morning I woke to find a complete lack of internet access in my house. Nothing was getting out, so went through my usual routine of re-setting my adsl router, switch, pc's ..etc..
To my horror I discovered that the my firewall pc, although running was no longer responding over the network. After connecting a screen & keyboard to it, there was no response to my frantic keyboard mashing .. nada..
I decided the only course of action was to remove the power and see what happened. The PC started to fire up but there was nothing on-screen, no BIOS check, no more disk activity after the power on test etc. I then discovered the chipset fan was not spinning. Despite all my best coaxing the damned thing wasnt going to come back to life. Now it's the school holidays here in the UK so I had children wailing at me to get the internet back and working (more pressure than I've had for a long time, let me tell you!)
I decided the only course of action was to rebuild the ASG using some old bits of pc I had knocking about. I had a motherboard with a CPU & fan mounted on it so removed the network cards out of the failed box, and placed them in the new one. Did the same with the memory (I was lucky as these boards although being different manufacturer and layout took the same memory (old DDR stuff). I then swapped the hard disks.
Now at this point I would normally have put the ASG cd in the drive and prepared my USB key with the backup I had taken (manually btw, as for whatever reason auto backups no longer get sent to me via email) but I decided to fire it up and see what happened.
To my absolute shock, the ASG fired up, beeped at me (after a few minutes) and let me connect! *everything* seemed to work as before!
Now I've done similar things with various linux distro's in the past and a few windows installs but never had this level of success. I just wanted to let the Astaro team know, and ask them to keep up the good work.
Thanks chaps/chapesses.