Sorry for those of my readers who tried to contact my blog in the past few days, unfortunately there has been some different reasons why I had to keep it offline, just barely related to my one week break.
The reason why it did go down is that Wednesday at 13:40 I started smelling a bad acid smell in my office (where all my boxes are, included Farragut). I thought it was caused by some equipment in there, some messed up capacitor, maybe one of the two UPSes being faulty, but it was a spray detergent I had in the room, that was too under pressure for the high temperature that we reached in the last few days (37C is too high).
Then Thursday I was entirely offline, thanks to my ISP who had quite big problems on their routers; my neighbours, who has the same exact provider and contract, still had connection, and my 3G phone was ready to let me contact someone (lavish) to set me officially away for a while.
Yesterday then I decided to turn Farragut back on, but it refused to: the disk was too messed up to run fsck on it, and thus it couldn’t mount it correctly. So I decided to take the SATA controller out of Klothos and put it with a spare 160G drive in Farragut, and then import the data. In the process, I also seen some brownish areas on the network card (D-Link Realtek, also smelling funny), and while Klothos was open there I decided to take out also the Intel network card that was in there. Unfortunately, /home was unreadable.
Today I tried recovering /home from the harddisk by mounting it in a USB external enclosure, but the disk refused to get itself copied through dd, and I couldn’t copy the flags by mounting the partition on Linux.. although actually there weren’t many flags in there anyway. Anyway, after a couple of tries, I couldn’t even mount the partition anymore, so.
Luckily the blog’s database was in /var, as well as the GIT repositories, and I maintain a copy of the website’s SVN repository in Enterprise, so the only actual lost things were some personal settings, my zsh configuration files (that were just a copy of the ones I have in Enterprise and Parkesh), my .emacs (almost a copy), and the configured checkouts of typo and gitarella. The first was a bit tricky, mostly because last time I tried upgrading to newer versions of Typo, it crapped out on me, and so I should have to look for the correct revision to use, but I was able to put Typo 4.1 branch up and running, even if I had to edit a couple of things in the middle of it because of a nasty bug in either rails or typo itself (for a series of reasons, I usually end up NOT using the SVN version of rails, but rather the Gentoo ebuilds for it).
Anyway, the blog is back, and I’ll later try to explain how my break week is going (spoiler: it hasn’t been a break, and it is going bad).
