What Would Life Be Without a Few Roadblocks?

Enjoy a sunrise photo instead of hacking content.

Naturally, once I got the lab built back up and everything would be when my server would die again. So for the past few days I've torn the server down to check everything, run all 8 drives through Hard Disk Sentinel to check the status and make sure the disks themselves weren't bad (all 8 disks scored 100%, despite all being used drives I picked up with the server years ago. I think they're from ~2014?) and then wiped all 8 drives just to be safe. I re-assembled everything, powered it back up and initialized the new Virtual Disk...annnnnnd another drive vanished. 

At this point, I'm thinking the SAS Backplane that the drives actually directly plug into that sits directly behind the drive bays may be bad, but for the time being, I just popped out drive 3 which was throwing the error and made the extra 7th drive a hot-swappable drive. This means I'm down to roughly 2TB of space instead of the 3+ I had previously, which for a lab, it more than enough.

Unfortunately, this means the update on the actual scanning and early stages of trying to grab passwords and user accounts that I was wanting to get posted today has been thrown for a loop. But, the good thing is I at least can be pretty assured in what is causing my server issues, and replacement parts don't appear to be too expensive should I decide to go down that road in the future. For now, however, actually getting back to the lab work and hacking is the top priority, so we'll push forward with a smaller hard drive and more stability...fingers crossed.

Today's going to be spent rebuilding everything from the last post, getting Kali reconfigured again, and then probably unplugging everything in the high tech lab (aka closet) and re-running the network cables to get everything back into an organized state.

Until next time!

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