>GMD goes bad on me quite frequently, either not letting me in, not letting me
>do anything useful once I'm there, or throwing me off without warning. It
>seems to happen most often at weekends. Usually though everything's lovely
>again after a few hours.
The machine automatically reboots every Monday morning very early (local
time), but it starts issuing the usual warning messages some time before
that. If your ftp client forwards those messages to you, you should at least
be warned. There are no other scheduled interruptions.
My personal impression is that the phone carriers tend to do maintenance on
weekends; last weekend the transatlantic links were down for several hours,
e.g.. This shouldn't have hurt your connection from the UK, though, but I
heard rumors that there were some problems at a node in Aachen, too, and the
UK links are quite likely to pass through Aachen.
But now to the really important facts:
The disk failure problem is fixed; all the data were restored without loss.
Volker