##CategoryRants
##CategoryComputers
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12-02-03

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["Azizi"] waves.

["Calin"] has a tale to tell.

["Calin"] says, "A tale of horror."

["Pearl"] says, "Oh, lots of tales today. Is it about what happened yesterday?"

["Calin"] says, "A tale of how the server was down yesterday, and how I was up till 4am..."

["Pearl"] exclaims, "WHOA!"

["Calin"] says, "And finally of how it all works perfectly by the morning."

["Pearl"] says, "Whew, so it has a good ending, ["Calin"]?"

["Azizi"] blinks, "What was wrong with it?"

["Calin"] says, "Oooook."

["Calin"] says, "So, as you may or may not know, I upgraded the [wiki:WikiPedia:Linux_kernel kernel] recently."

["Pearl"] settles in to listen.

["Azizi"] settles in next to ["Pearl"].

["Calin"] says, "Then I upgraded several packages to get various things to work better (or at all) with the new [wiki:WikiPedia:Linux_kernel kernel].

["Calin"] says, "So yesterday, I noticed that the server could not make outgoing connections."

["Calin"] says, "Which was very odd, as we could connect to it."

["Pearl"] remembers.

["Calin"] says, "This meant a couple of things: It could not send mail (though it could receive it), and it could not update splitreflection.com if my WikiPedia:Dsl went down."

["Calin"] says, "Now, to start with, I was not very smart."

["Calin"] says, "Yesterday from work I futzed with the [wiki:WikiPedia:Routing_table routing table]. Which changed things so we couldn't connect anymore. So I had to run home to fix it."

["Calin"] says, "Then, I decided to restart my WikiPedia:Router. Also from work. Also a bad idea, as restarting the WikiPedia:Router means my WikiPedia:Dsl goes down... and the server couldn't fix its [wiki:WikiPedia:IP_address ip address] after coming back up."

["Calin"] says, "Which again means we can't connect."

["Calin"] says, "And I was swamped with Work in the afternoon, so I couldn't run home to fix it."

["Calin"] says, "Anyway, I didn't get out of work till about 6, and I rushed home."

["Calin"] says, "I futzed with it for a while, and decided some settings weren't loaded properly on the server. So I figured I'd reboot."

["Cal"] says, "DA Da dahhh."

["Calin"] says, "After rebooting, the network didn't work at all. It seems one of the packages I upgraded went to the trouble of deleting my old network configuration."

- Ka-BOOM!!!

["Calin"] says, "And my auto-detect package hadn't been upgraded and didn't work with the new stuff..."

["Calin"] says, "So I figured I'd boot with my handy linux boot cd (which would get the network going), and then download the newer auto-detect packages."

["Calin"] says, "Well. It seems the [wiki:WikiPedia:Cmos cmos] battery was dead, and it defaulted to booting first from the hard disk, last from the cd."

["Cal"] asks, "Crunch?"

["Calin"] says, "So I ran out and bought a new battery."

["Calin"] says, "I came home, opened up the system, put in the battery and pushed the power button...."

["Calin"] says, "And waited...."

["Calin"] says, "The drives whirred up, but the keyboard and monitor stayed off."

["Calin"] exclaims, "FUBAR!"

["Azizi"] meeps.

["Calin"] says, "I will probably need to cook that motherboard for a couple more minutes. That's what it did before my brother and I fixed it in the oven."

["Calin"] says, "Bad solder joint somewhere."

["Calin"] says, "So, as you can see, this is going from bad to worse."

["Azizi"] nods.

["Calin"] says, "I couldn't even WORK on the problem I had at first until I fixed the more serious motherboard problem."

["Calin"] says, "So ANYWAY."

["Cal"] says, "hardware failures, one thing even linux has trouble with."

["Calin"] says, "After holding my head in despair for a little while, and crying on my girlfriend's shoulder, I came back to the problem."

["Calin"] says, "Penguin had two hard drives. The root drive, and the media drive."

["Calin"] says, "I took them out of the system, and put the root drive into my USB enclosure, and hooked it up to my desktop computer."

["Calin"] says, "I copied the whole thing to my hard drive."

["Calin"] says, "Then I hooked up the media drive, and moved the contents of the root drive onto there. So now all of Penguin is on one hard drive."

["Pearl"] says, "Whew! What a pain."

["Calin"] says, "I changed my desktop computer's name and [wiki:WikiPedia:IP_address IP] to match penguin."

["Calin"] says, "I moved my WikiPedia:Telnet service to a different [wiki:WikiPedia:Computer_port_%28software%29 port], and shut down a few other services."

["Cal"] asks, "so we have a temporary fix?"

["Calin"] says, "I [wiki:WikiPedia:Chroot chroot]ed to the usb drive, and started up all the services."

["Calin"] says, "And here we are."

["Calin"] says, "Yup."

["Azizi"] says, "And now I know why I couldn't connect last night."

["Calin"] says, "And then I went to bed."

["Pearl"] says, "Ugh."

["Azizi"] shakes her head, "What a pain."