Arrived at
oh-dark-thirty to find that our
HP-UX server had not come back up properly after its
backup. Worse yet, nobody was answering the
tech support line. Uttering a few silent prayers and a few audible curses, I shut off the power, counted to 10 (for emotional, not technical, reasons), and turned it back on again. It worked!
Checked my mail and saw that our Linux server had some filesystem problems during its backup, so I rebooted that the nice way, reboot -n. Everything seemed to be fine, except that it had no earthly idea what eth0 was or why I would want to use it. (This means it was a perfect server except for the fact that it was completely inaccessible on the network. Pretty damn secure, though.)
Rebooted it a few times, checked the ethernet cabling, tried manually configuring eth0. No dice. Decided to blow the dust off the NIC and see if that helped.
Couldn't find the key that unlocks the chassis, so I pried the front of the case off with my bare hands. There was dust everywhere: under the front panel, on the CD-ROM drive, on the floppy in the floppy drive, in the ... the floppy in the floppy drive? Eject. "New Kernel". Oh yeah, that's right. It hadn't worked last time either. Er, I mean, it was dust on the network card. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
So finally everything was okay. What do you mean you can't get your e-mail? Oh, crap on a crutch... I started diagnosing the POP3 daemon's woes, and it suddenly decided to start working again. Go figure.
So finally everything is okay. I think...