We are about to launch a new service at The Frontier Group called Harmony Backup. It's a remote, off-site backup service aimed at client's Linux machines. Not all of our clients host their services with us, some have other providers, and some have servers on-site at their office. When they break, we're normally the ones to sort it out.

So a few clients got emails about the pending Harmony Backup launch, and how if they signed on early they'd receive an early-adopters discount/bonus.

I got a call this morning from a client that their old IBM workhorse had fallen over. It is a Pentium II 300MHz Netfinity 3000 that was a hand-me-down to their intranet project when they got a new Windows server. This baby is made of cast-iron, and has run without a hitch for the last few years. It has Debian Sarge on the disk, and had an uptime of over a year (which was reset when maintenance people pulled it off the UPS for no good reason).

Thankfully there was a spare machine that I threw the SCSI card into, and I'm now using Harmony Backup to pull the data down to my laptop as I type.

The first thing my client said when she saw me was "I think we need to arange those off-site backups!"

Ah, yeah. That's what my email said last month - I wasn't trying to sell you something you don't need :)

Edit: 10 minutes later:
So I'm walking down the hallway at the client's premises, looking for my contact. I do an about turn in front of a bunch of ladies (all in their mid-40s) and hear a few "who's that guy, he's a spunk" comments. Ha! I've still got it!