Christmas and stuff

[giza]

There's never a dull moment at work since I had some interesting server problems on Monday night. We were shutting the electricity off for some electrical work. In preparation for this, I decided to reboot chewtoy (one of my servers that had 250 days of uptime) to make sure it would come up okay when power was restored later that night. Well, I rebooted the machine from ssh, and sure enough it didn't come back up.

So, I attached a head (monitor and keyboard) to watch the bootup sequence. Interestingly enough, it stopped at "Verifying DMI data". Very strange. After successfully booting from a CD and being able to access both the hard drives (I have a RAID-1 configuration), I then did old-fashioned troubleshooting and finally discovered tht the machine would not boot from hda. When I removed it, it would boot from hdc just fine. So after I was at it for about half an hour, I just grabbed another hard drive and popped it in, verified that it worked then shut the machine down. The following morning, I came in at like 8:30 (early for me), booted the machine and rebuilt the RAID-1 array onto the new drive. What a pain in the butt.

Christmas went pretty well this year. I drove up to Allentown for the traditional family gathering. I like the fact that we're all old enough to drink now. It makes the dinner a whole lot more fun when we're having alcohol and making smartass remarks at each other. Christmas day with my family was also nice. I got a couple of cool gifts, including:

- A leopard-print quilt for my bed. It's beautiful!

- Leopard print pillows

- Aaaaand, a rather good Lion King Story Book in ITALIAN. My folks had picked it up for me when they were in Italy awhile ago.

I came back home last night so I could come to the office today. We were closed, so I was able to get more work done and suck up the T1's bandwidth listening to Gaming FM and not get in troble for it. :-) Among other things I did today, I downloaded and installed a password management system called PMS. Heehee. I also worked on the hard disk that gave me problems on Monday night. I put it in another machine and just like before, it wouldn't boot. Then I booted off of a CD-ROM and ran badblocks on it, but was unable to find anything wrong. Finally, I ran grub-install to rewrite the GRUB code to the Master Boot Record and whaddya know, the machine booted without incident. That's the first time I've ever had an MBR go bad on a Linux box. I sure didn't see that coming.

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas this year.

Comments

[shenryyr.livejournal.com]

yay!  happy x-mas! :D

[darthgeek.livejournal.com]

I was going to get on you about not picking up any A-Treat for me, but, then I figured that the store was very likely closed for some odd reason ;)