sutton050

Yeah, something very bad has happened with one of my boxes... It was not responsive over the network this morning, I thought little of it, power cycled it and came back to it this afternoon. Anyway, it was still not playing ball, I rolled the vmlinuz image back to 4.4 from 4.15 (the last unattended update I did last week) but everything.  I mean everything, every command, every program (except cat and ls) resulted in a "segmentation fault". Booting into recovery I got a little further, but the syslog looks very worrisome... And I could only see this image when I had hauled the machine back into the office and plugged a VGA cable into it, over the network and even over the serial TTY it just sat there spinning it's wheels. I would like some of the data back off this box, it contains the current (more recent) live image of my WOW server and it contains the old archived version of my Ark server. Other than that there is a ZFS area which I've dumped home photo's onto,...

A long time coming, here's another story from my days long past, this one takes me to my very first serious role in an IT department, I was however just the dogs body.  The company ran many old PC's (which I actually was around to see mostly be updated to nice Compaq Pentium III's) and they had a couple of high spec Silicon Graphics workstations in the design department. The main manufacturing control and purchasing system, as well as payroll and a bunch of other services ran on a dual 386 based mini computer, which had a custom cut of ScoUnix and a bunch of bespoke C programs comprising the actual system stack, this was accessed by a whole host or Gandalf multiplexers combining the serial connections down from a hundred or so Wyse brand terminals (I wish I'd have nabbed one of those before I left). Anyway, it was time for this back end stack to be updated, and so a pair of Compaq Proliant servers were brought in, these were dual Pentium III class with a dedicated stora...