I went up to my friend Mark's house to play some boardgames on Saturday night. Unbeknownst to me, right around midnight Saturday night, my machine that is co-located at his ISP (MV.com), croaked. I was within ten minutes of it, but instead I blithely drove home after watching Casablanca yet again, sending me an hour in the wrong direction. On Sunday morning, I get an email from someone trying to use one of the servers I host on the box and, uh uh, it was down. Of course, it had to be on a busy Sunday, so I couldn't do anything about it. But MV sent someone in and tried to reboot it. But the box was dead Jim.
So Mark brought the box home with him on Monday and I drove on up there for an emergency power supply-pendectomy. I picked up a cheap US$30 250 watt power supply (gee, I wonder why my boxes keep dying...) at CompUSA and did my first power supply transplant operation on Mark's table. Plugged everything back in, turned the power on, it rebooted, all is good, right?
Wrong. We paid the price for being confident and when the box was actually plugged in at MV and turned on, massive numbers disk errors showed up. So many, in fact, that even fsck -y couldn't fix them. Now what...
Some Googling around found others complaining of the same error, but no help was forthcoming. The Mark wrote a little utility that performed some disk magic, re-ran fsck and I'm back in business. Well, it took a few more tweaks, of course, and I'm still not sure exactly how bad the collateral damage is, but its good to be back up and running.
By a weird bit of synchronicity, Lifehacker just posted a bit about Backing Up Your Weblog, using a new service called Backupmyblog.com. I think I may just check them out!
