Great Success!
We’ve had some downtime recently. Two and a half weeks’ worth. Today I’m going to write about that.
On the evening of August 7th, I drove back up to Cambria. In a later post I’ll talk about what happened after that.
A few hours after I left, my server went down. Rushi tried to restart it, but lilo threw an error on startup. He and I tried to debug it, and we decided to boot a liveCD and re-run lilo. Rushi booted Knoppix, re-ran lilo, and restarted. The machine crashed on boot. Repeated restarts would cause it to crash in different places on boot. Clearly, something was up. DJC tried his hand, but the machine just kept crashing. Eventually liveCDs would crash, and I even got the BIOS to lock up on the boot-menu - several times. Conclusion: bad mobo.
So yesterday Mark, Rushi, Scott, and I all went to Fry’s. We talked for a while in the motherboard section, and I finally settled on an Abit KV-85 and a Sempron 2800+ (socket 754, the good one). Cost: $90.
I had a nightmare of a time trying to get it all up and running again, greatly assisted by Rushi with moral support from Mark, Scott, and Ben. I was hampered especially by, well, lilo, which was in fact legitimately broken unrelated to the mobo troubles. So I’ve negotiated with it and /boot is no longer a software raid1. That means if hda dies I’m in some hefty trouble. (Hear me baby? Hold together.)