I find that among my least favorite types of problems are those that I’m unable to learn from. My main system drive was spontaneously remounted read-only, and upon Alt-Sysreq-reisub’ing, the OS didn’t come up and I got “error: partition not found” and a grub rescue> prompt that couldn’t do anything; not even “help.” I pushed in all the SATA cables and it came up, but upon reboot the drives were out of correct boot order. Bizarre. The part about this that scares me is that I’m for the most part unable to learn anything from this, and I wasn’t able to do anything to stop it from happening again because I don’t know why it happened. The same thing applies to the mysterious times this machine goes completely unresponsive while idle or suddenly doesn’t have video on boot, then spontaneously regains it. The former has happened a few times, the latter only one.
From programming in assembly, I finally realize how segmentation faults are really nice compared to the alternative. Data and instruction separation is a luxury. Miss a bounds check and suddenly you’re executing things not intended to be instructions and you get really weird opcodes and the whole thing dies. It can get really frustrating.
I realized the only reasons my server has gone down at dad’s are due to external forces: either the power has gone out at the power outage or circuit breaker level, or cables have been unplugged by unwitting family members. I wonder how much better colos are. ChunkHost was really nice, and I’d have likely continued once my “free beta” ended (I have my suspicions it’s a marketing thing for “free trial”) if I had more disposable income to the point where I felt I could justify a monthly fee.
EDIT: I had forgotten the time it went down as I was upgrading from Debian Lenny to Squeeze. I had set up a virtual machine for fallback, but I didn’t end up using it: in restoring the VM from backup I unknowingly uncovered a configuration problem with one of the hosted sites that showed up a few days later on the main server. Whoops.