well, that wasn’t fun. I lost a network card in my firewall (no, it didn’t suddenly run away) – I’d been wondering why it was taking so long to download mail and files from my mail server, which sits on a protected part of my network. turns out the network card was dying – and it in fact died today – i replaced it with an old variant of the same card and brought the firewall back up again – all was well. but i still hate having to do crap like that in the middle of the day, when i really would rather be working :(