Fear not, salvation is at hand! Although many Web 2.0 sites providing text-editing will save drafts and provide a reasonable text editor, nothing beats your favourite text editor of all time, Vim. Or Emacs. Or whatever you would prefer to use. Why shouldn’t you be able to use any text editor you like? It’s your computer and your time after all!

If you are using Firefox, your problems are over. Introducing It’s All Text. Install this handy plug-in to your Firefox, set the default editor to your liking and you are off and running! Now any text box on any webpage will show a small edit button on the bottom right corner allowing you to launch the editor of your choice. Edit to your heart’s content using the tools you are most familiar with, then save and exit the editor and have all your work sent back to the browser text box.

Even if the browser crashes mid-edit, your editor program will be unaffected and your work will be safe. You can save your work in the editor in addition to any swap or draft files it creates for even more safeguards.

It’sAllText works in Firefox 3.0. If you have older versions of Firefox you may wish to check out MozEX which is a similar plug-in.

Hard drive failure is a fact of life when you run servers, by sheer virtue of that fact that you have hundreds of them. To mitigate the risk and reduce unscheduled downtime, we use Window’s built-in software RAID feature. It’s not an enterprise solution, but it gets the job done. What’s important is staying online and not losing data.

Did I mention that trying to monitor a Windows box is a nightmare? A colleague of mine wrote a script to allow us to keep a watchful eye on Windows RAID volumes, it’s a lifesaver. A recently-deployed machine got a broken mirror, which we were able to act on immediately. We removed the dodgy mirror and prepared a replacement (we always have plenty of spares, of course). Allow me now to re-enact this scene…

Windows (sounding almost efficient): The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk1\DR9 has predicted that it will fail

Sysadmin: Thanks, Windows, I’ll get right on that. You didn’t say whether that was SMART, or just voodoo, but whatever, it’s good to know.

The bad drive is removed and a replacement installed in the hotswap drive bay

Sysadmin: Okay, Windows, do your stuff. “Scan for new hardware”, please.

A pause.

Sysadmin: Ahem, Windows, “Scan for new hardware” and find my drive.

Windows: ‘Ey there, chaps. Do what now, you say? AIEEEEGRH!!

The server stops responding entirely, necessitating a touch of the reset button

Needless to say, we’re rather unimpressed, and have to call the customer to let them know why it’s just dropped offline.

A quick check of the logs is in order. It’s also frustrating that there’s no sane way to scroll through log entries in Windows with something like a text editor, or to “tail” a log as it’s updated in realtime.

09:36 – The previous system shutdown at 9:21:23 AM on 8/10/2008 was unexpected.

Okay, it went down at 09:21, which is correct. Now if we look back in time a little…

09:21 – dmio: Harddisk1 write error at block 1953524618 due to disk removal

*sigh* And this is after the disk was removed cleanly…