December 9, 2005

Who stole my voice?

Wow, this is strange. Our primary server has been down since mid-morning when the masterswitch blew up (I'm not sure it did anything quite as exciting as actually blowing up, but it sure stopped working in a hurry). After it was replaced, our server failed to come up cleanly, which meant one very hurried trip to London to give it some TLC. Once again, the evil that is LILO had managed to fry itself, which it does whenever anyone sneezes at it or looks at it funny.

So here's the strange bit. I think I'm more distressed at not being able to blog than I am at not being able to send or receive email. The idea of not being able to broadcast "I'm alright, we're having some minor technical difficulties is all, and by the way, LILO sucks!" is quite disturbing. Like someone stole my voice.

Posted by savs at December 9, 2005 2:01 AM
Comments

Would GNU GRUB be a better boat loader? I've read that 'LILO locates the data it requires (in particular, your kernel) through a static list of sectors and offsets. So, any changes in the drive geometry can cause LILO to break and necessitate a boot from a rescue disk. GRUB, on the other hand, actually understands drive geometry and even knows how to read your filesystems.'

Posted by: Ashley Howes at December 10, 2005 5:59 PM

I've found grub to be a lot more reliable (I don't think I have lilo on any systems I manage now) but the real saviour is remote console access: it's well worth the money to install it on every server ever.

I was rather surprised to find grub able to boot from ataraid in its default debian configuration. Isn't ataraid rather an evil hack?

Posted by: MJR/slef at December 11, 2005 3:08 PM

Remote console access I have. Work well, it does not (in this instance). Bad BIOS, amongst other things.

Posted by: Andrew Savory at December 11, 2005 7:56 PM

Wow, that sucks. Can you name and shame the BIOS? (I have remote console via the PS2 and VGA ports on some systems to get around some of those...)

And now for "It could have been worse".

Apparently, Addenbrookes had their computers on a certain industrial estate in Hemel. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/4521608.stm

Posted by: MJR/slef at December 13, 2005 9:54 AM