Hooray for bad days. Our heating doesn't seem to be working, and then the ravenblack.net server died. Apparently there was scheduled maintenance of the network at the time, so we thought little of it. It didn't come back up... But the ISP are fairly inept, so extended outages are to be expected. We thought little of it. Then I tried a traceroute, which revealed that the network was working and only the end-point was broken. The person whose house it's in was called, and revealed that the machine was refusing to power up. We went round to diagnose; it seemed to be a power-supply problem. One new power-supply later revealed that no, it was a fried motherboard. So we came home and picked up a semi-spare machine to replace the other. A few minutes of fiddling with that revealed that its keyboard connector was broken, essentially rendering it another dead motherboard. The telling, of course, is much swifter than the enacting, which involved about 30 screws at every step, each of which were carefully placed in the most awkward and annoying place possible. So, we went out to see if we could find a purchasable motherboard that would support either of the two processors that were now floating free. We couldn't. So we came home again, this time to pick up the lady's desktop machine, and gut it to turn it into the server. At last, the hardware worked. Unfortunately, at this point it was revealed that the Linux kernel wouldn't load with this slightly older processor, because it had been compiled optimised, or so we thought. Some time later, after another kernel had been compiled using a different hard-drive as the launching point, it was revealed that the problem wasn't the kernel being a wrong version, but rather it being a fucked file. The 'generic' kernel wasn't a fucked file, but all the glibc libraries were fucked files too. Some installing from a CD later, and it lives once more - and we only had to replace 95% of the hardware and 50% of the operating system! Sweet!
[07:12]
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