On Friday around 3pm, I started to upgrade various packages on the server. The distro in use at the time was Fedora Core 2 - which had been out of the whole update scene for quite a while. This is something I wanted to correct.

I started installing a few packages that would have little impact on operations, when everything stopped. As only my ssh session was responding (no web, no new ssh sessions etc) I told the box to reboot. At this point, the server did a kernel crash and refused to do anything.

I called someone onsite to hard reset the server, and they watched the screen as it booted, however the kernel panic’ed on all reboots with an error in ext3.ko. This is where things get fun. It seems something (still unknown as to what at this point) corrupted around 91Mb total of files on the filesystem. One of these was ext3.ko - which made the box unbootable. At this point, I also redelegated the multiple domains on the server to another primary nameserver to stop having DNS issues with the primary nameserver offline.

I then pulled the server out and brought it home to work on - and I figured that as it wouldn’t boot at all, I’d upgrade it to the latest Fedora Core 4 packages as I went. It then turned out that the journal was also corrupt on the ext3 filesystems - and as it was the root drive, the system would not let me fcsk it without major hassles - and 91Mb worth of lost data.

So, I booted of the FC ‘panic’ DVD and copied as much data as possible off the system, reformatted the whole thing and installed FC4. The rest went without a hitch. The fairly recent tape backup (done on the 19/2) restored without a hitch, and 95% of things were back to normal. This took between 7pm and around 4:30am Friday night/Sat morning.

I had to work at 9am, so I did my 9->5 shift and then came home to work more in the server. As most of the data was repaired, I spent myself punishing the server to see if I could make it crash again - with no luck.

Today, the server went with me to work (for another 9am -> 5pm shift) where I tried harder to make it crash (no success!) and finally tonight at around 7:30pm the server was put back online in it’s new home in Collins St.

Sorry to all for the outage. It wasn’t something planned, however the backup system worked flawlessly to get the machine fully rebuilt and back online in a shade over 48 hours with minimal data lost.

I’m currently working on improving the backup to a nightly setup at a remote location, to minimise data loss to under a day - however this is currently in the planning/testing stage.

This one comes from the weird department. I was just leaving for work the other day when I notice that some punk had spray painted crud on both mine and my next door neighbours garage doors.

I won’t post any pictures of it, but it’s not the kind of look that I want for my house!

Anyway, we were looking up things that remove spray paint - and the proper stuff is damn expensive - when someone suggested using fly spray. Now I was interested by this - but as it turns out, fly spray removes spray paint.

Now the tools for this job are quite specific, as using the wrong type of cloth will just spread the paint around. We found that a ‘Chux’ type cloth (the ones that are thin with lots of holes) work very well - whereas the normal cloths just spread stuff around. The Chux cloths also rinse clean in warm water - so you can actually remove the paint.

This just has to be filed in the ‘who-would-have-thought’ file.

I’ve had this Orinoco 802.11b PCMCIA card lying around here for a while. It died when upgrading the firmware on it in a Mac when the card was removed too soon. So, I decided to do what all good geeks do when something dies. You rip it apart.

Melrose Drive , Tullamarine , Victoria . January 16th 2006 : 14.35 hours

Highway patrol pulls over a Workcover Inspector for doing 68 in a 60 zone. Workcover Inspector says nothing and cops the $120 fine sweet. Policeman finishes writing ticket and proceeds back to his car. Workcover Inspector in the mean time, gets digital camera out of bag, photographs the cop and proceeds to the police car where he issues the Policeman with an $800.00 fine for not wearing his hi-visibility vest when leaving his vehicle in a high traffic area.

It just doesn’t get any sweeter than that.

I was putting my shopping away today, and I just had to laugh at the contents of my fridge afterwards. From looking at the contents, it’s just typical that I’m single. To the left is a quick photo of the contents. I don’t know if I should be proud of it or not :)

This makes me wonder… what’s in the fridges of other single guys out there? I’m sure some people have worse things in their fridge.

See, the guys who have chicks - they usually have some things of nutritional value in the fridge - but for the single guys who live of burgers, steak and pizza - then there’s not much else to put in a fridge apart from what you see here.

Oh - and we all know that the beer goes at the bottom of the fridge - because that’s where the coldest air is. Coke and cheese just don’t deserve that. And the lettice got thrown out shortly after this picture.