Gordon called this morning. I always like hearing from Gordon, and today was no exception. Even when “the pooh has struck the rotary oscillator,” Gordon is polite and amiable. Since Gordon manages a slew of networks, the best way to keep in touch with him is to break one of his servers.
To make sure he doesn’t forget about me, I wrote a program to do this automatically. I’m quite clever about it. The breakages coincides with power outages, lightning strikes, and other such events so my tracks are always covered. Gordon has to call me at least once every year or two.
After a manual fsck, his server back came back online but wasn’t working. We figured out that he’d changed the default gateway of the network since the machine was last rebooted. We updated the routing table on the machine and all was well. Since it had been 14 months since the box was last touched, we decided I should do some updates.
Partway though, I filled up /var. Oh, the partition is only 256MB. That’s a tad on the small side, I thought. Then I looked at the disk size: 16GB. RAID 5. Seriously? 9GB disks. And 256MB of RAM. The Pentium III processor dates the machine to circa 1999. And I just upgraded the OS to current. Amazing.