All hardware sucks
The Apple time capsule I’d set up in the basement to act as the backbone for our network smoked this afternoon during a windstorm – either the power surge when the power went out or back on again fried the disk controller (possibly the disk, but I can’t easily tell because it’s a big old server-grade 3.5" unit that draws more power than the USB port on my macbook can supply) and converted the thing into an inefficient space heater (I’m guessing the amber light of doom is because the disk controller failed, because that’s one of the two things people mentioned online as a reason for a pitiless unblinking amber light of doom and when I pulled the thing open and replaced the hard drive with a known-good notebook disk it still gave me the amber light of doom.)
So out in the middle of the storm to the local Apple Store where I plunked down more money than I care to think about (and why doesn’t Apple set up their Airport/Time Capsule OS to use dnsmasq or some alternative so that the thing can do dhcp+dns and give me proper forward/reverse mappings like Postel Himself intended?) to buy a Shiny! New! 2gb Time Capsule that will hopefully last as long as this one did before it stopped functioning .
(At least I’ve got one of those Next Thing SBCs sitting in the basement so I can put dnsmasq on it and have it be my local dns+dhcp server.)