Mission.net Recovery.

One of my many hobbies includes working on a host call Mission.net this host is an index/content provider for many RM websites. If you want to find an old Companion, go here. If you want to find out about reunions, go here.

For the last few weeks, this host has been doing Kernel panics. In the Windows world, this is akin to the “Blue Screen of Death”. Every time I’ve seen it happen, I’ve logged in remotely to the server, and rebooted the host.

The error has been ext3/journalling related. This is the filesystem. I have been upgrading packages, upgrading the kernel, all in a attempt to figure out what’s wrong.

Well, on Monday morning, mission.net was down once again. I got onto the console, started the host back up, and forced it to check the disks.

The corruption that had happened, was in a word, bad. Actually, it would be better described as “The horror, the horror.”

It was so hosed, it would not allow me to force the filesystem check. So at home, I was pressing the “y” button, at work, I was pressing the “y” button, and then back home, I was pressing the “y” button (to make it correct the problems). Finally I had enough. I had better things to do.

Enter the work Launch medallion and my little star wars storm trooper Lego man!
You can’t see him, but that little storm trooper is keeping that Enter key held firmly down. (Necessity *is* the mother of jury rigging)
I stared at this screen (which was repeating over and over) until about 11:00, went to bed.

Work called me at 2 am, and after that was done, I went downstairs, checked the laptop, and it was still going.

Luckily, it was done in the morning. And I just had to put everything back together again.

Looks like minus some log files, and some e-mail. Everything is working just fine, and I’m hoping the ext3 kernel panics are a thing of the past.