It's a long story but this is an example of why you don't run a web site on a consumer grade cable line. My Internet connection went down Wednesday night or Thursday morning and I kept calling and they said there was an outage in my area. I finally called this morning and they said the outage should be cleared up and I shouldn't have been experiencing a problem anyway. Well, I wasn't happy at this point and they said they could send someone out during the day on Tuesday. I said I work on Tuesdays. I then said I guess I'll check into what it would take to replace my cable connection with a DSL connection and they put me on hold for a while and then said they could get someone out to look at it today (Saturday).
The guy hooked his testor up to the cable and said the cable checked out good so it must be a bad modem. No problem, he went out to the truck and picked up a new modem and plugged it in. Still didn't work. He was confident that the cable was good so he grabbed another modem and it too didn't work. He had one more modem that had been rolling around in the back of the truck for a while and plugged it in and bingo, it worked.
That's only half of the fun I had in the last 24 hours. Maybe when I get caught up I'll fill you in on the other problem I had that caused me to "reinstall" Linux for the first time ever in the 12 years I have been using it.
Down for last 3 days... sorry!
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Down for last 3 days... sorry!
by Void Main » Sat Apr 30, 2005 3:57 pm
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Void Main - Site Admin
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by Void Main » Sun May 01, 2005 7:04 pm
The reinstall was on my laptop. I run VMware on it and I have (had) it set up to use the "whole disk". This is something not recommended by VMware and is an advanced option. I have been running it this way for a year with no problem. Well, I was doing some house cleaning on my drive and realized I had several "*.REDO.* files in my VMware directory. I figured these were for snapshots so you can revert back to a previous state. These things were taking up a lot of space (a few were over 1GB each) so I went and deleted the snapshot session via the menus. It really chunked away for a long time and I noticed a lot of hard drive activity throughout the process.
Finally after 5 minutes or so of this it finished and I shut down VMware and then proceeded to get some serious errors about corrupt system libraries and the like. I could not boot the system and booted into Rescue mode and started a fsck. This was the nastiest fsck I have ever done and soon into the fsck I started getting a sinking feeling. After thousands upon thousands of errors/repairs it *appeared* that looking through the directories that at least the file names seemed to be in tact. The problem is, the contents of the files weren't necessarily what should have been in there. It seemed that most everyting in /usr/lib/*, /usr/bin/*, /sbin/*, etc were just trashed. I tarred up /etc/*, /home/*, /var/*, /root/*, /usr/local/*, etc and copied them off to another machine and then tried to do a reinstall without formatting the file system. This crashed and burned so I had to reinstall and reformat the Linux partitions and reinstall. I should have done the backups prior to doing the fsck but luckily I have been able to recover just about everything. There were only a few corrupt files under /home and they were not essential.
This all happened while my cable was out so I couldn't hook up to the net and get most of the updates and packages I needed to repair the system. So that's my story. It wasn't fun at all. In order to use the "whole disk" method in VMware and boot my "other" OS I had to pass some disk geometry parameters to the kernel. I'm thinking this might have had something to do with trashing the file system but I don't really know. All I know is that I hope it doesn't happen again!
Finally after 5 minutes or so of this it finished and I shut down VMware and then proceeded to get some serious errors about corrupt system libraries and the like. I could not boot the system and booted into Rescue mode and started a fsck. This was the nastiest fsck I have ever done and soon into the fsck I started getting a sinking feeling. After thousands upon thousands of errors/repairs it *appeared* that looking through the directories that at least the file names seemed to be in tact. The problem is, the contents of the files weren't necessarily what should have been in there. It seemed that most everyting in /usr/lib/*, /usr/bin/*, /sbin/*, etc were just trashed. I tarred up /etc/*, /home/*, /var/*, /root/*, /usr/local/*, etc and copied them off to another machine and then tried to do a reinstall without formatting the file system. This crashed and burned so I had to reinstall and reformat the Linux partitions and reinstall. I should have done the backups prior to doing the fsck but luckily I have been able to recover just about everything. There were only a few corrupt files under /home and they were not essential.
This all happened while my cable was out so I couldn't hook up to the net and get most of the updates and packages I needed to repair the system. So that's my story. It wasn't fun at all. In order to use the "whole disk" method in VMware and boot my "other" OS I had to pass some disk geometry parameters to the kernel. I'm thinking this might have had something to do with trashing the file system but I don't really know. All I know is that I hope it doesn't happen again!
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Void Main - Site Admin
- Posts: 5705
- Joined: Wed Jan 08, 2003 5:24 am
- Location: Tuxville, USA
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