zabbo

Alright, put yourself in the mindset of a server in my basement. You’re kind of sad that the guy who maintains you is a few thousand miles away. Then his lovely wife has the nerve to go to California. It’s pretty lonely down there. What do you do?

Yes, that’s right, you have a few fans fail. Then heat gathers in the top of your ancient PC case. Which causes the power supply, cleverly designed to sit in the top of the case where heat gathers, to fail. The faulty power supply pulls power from two drives in a four drive array which flips the array into degraded mode wherein it can only return errors. Which hangs the machine as ext3 gets IO errors in the journal. You’ll show them!

I’m quite lucky to live a few blocks from one of the most capable sysadmins that I had the pleasure of starting my career with. I gave him a call, we shared some Simpson’s quotes (mostly Professor Frink), and managed to get things up and running again. He was able to transplant a power supply from a neighbouring test box. Thankfully the power drop didn’t damage the drives. Phew.

This was made that much funner by the fact that I hadn’t yet synced the most recent CRFS changes from that machine to a box at Oracle. The source that I’m giving a talk about on Friday here in Melbourne. Where the source is intended to be released.

So, I guess this means I get to play Christmas on Newegg with PC hardware when I get back. Yay, prezzies!