I’m off to Seattle tomorrow morning, I gots me a seminar to go to.
Ben, I responded to your comment you left earlier today and left my contact info, give me a call if you have some time to meet up and get some dinner or something. This will be a quick trip, over Saturday morning and back Sunday night, but it’ll be nice to avoid the heat we’re experiencing in Coeur d’Alene right now…
Just a word of advice to any UN*X/Linux people out there. I have done this for a while now, but forgot about it until today (when I needed it), when it saved my bacony pirate pigu:
Take the important contents of your /etc/fstab file and write it on a sticky note. Stick that to your hard drive in the computer. Two years down the road when you don’t remember what your partitioning table looks like and you have a crash like I did today, it will save you tons of trouble. Here’s what mine looks like:
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 /dev/sda2 swap /dev/sda3 / XFS
Scurvy Jake’s Pirate Blog was broadsided today by the hard drive pirates!
Eleven hours later (with a driving range/frustration break at 3pm—man that was hot!) we’re back up and running smooth.
What happened was I lost my drive partition’s superblock. Shout outs to Cray (yes, THAT Cray!) for having good XFS documentation. I was able to rescue my system and didn’t have to resore everything on to a new system from backup, although I was preparing to. It’s nice to have backups to fall back on (YES I make regular backups!), but it’s less time-consuming to keep your existing system and not migrate tons of settings.
I got my drive back, my /home partition was on a different drive (a good backup in itself, by the way), so all that data was safe.
So all in all, I lost a day of productivity, but was able to completely recover from a very serious error and, at the same time, test my backup procedures.
Basically, I figure I can’t tell people to back up their data if I don’t do it myself. Because I do back up everything important, I can laugh at other people that lose their data because they don’t take the time to make backups. I laugh doubly-hard at IT people that lose data due to not backing it up, they of all people should know better!