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Sat, 7 Jan 2006

Ker-Ash!

— SjG @ 12:03 am

So, courtesy of the DWP, the Meier Quagg was without power for about 7.5 hours today. It’s not clear what was wrong. The other side of the street had power, as did several parallel streets nearby, but this side of Meier was out, as were patches of Venice like the Oakwood.
Anyway, when the power came back up, most of the servers came back with it. Intervention was required for the Golem, Pylonhead, and Sekhmet. Sekhmet was the worst. I only got the “LI” of LILO, which says that the /boot/boot.b file was bad, or the drive geometry was hosed.

So I tried my trusty Debian rescue disk. Typed rescue root=/dev/hda1 at the boot: prompt. The boot failed with a complaint that /dev/hda1 was an MSDOS partition. uh-oh… MSDOS?

Of course, it turns out that I was using the wrong rescue disk. I was using a Woody ISO, and I had upgraded the machine to Sarge — and EXT3, which evidently was not compiled into the rescue disk. When I finally tried the correct rescue disk, it came up neatly, repaired the journals, and gave me my precious root prompt.

I did the LILO replacement trick (lilo -u /dev/hda; lilo), popped out the CD, rebooted, and held my breath. Then I decided to breathe. It’s my second fastest server, but it’s still a four-plus-year-old Dell Optiplex. In any case, it came up cleanly and there was much rejoicing.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the mail secondary to forward on all the queued up spam.


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