Blog - /Personal

During my PLUG presentation on Friday, I noticed that my system was spewing some strange error messages when trying to compile an example C program. Later on that night, the thing would not even boot. I run fsck, and sure enough, the / partition was hosed. After watching fsck make countless hundreds of "repairs", most of the contents of the partition were gone. Time to re-install. For this partition, it doesn't seem to matter whether I use ext3 or reiserfs — the thing gets corrupted once a year regardless.

I did not have a Ubuntu CD on me, so I booted off of a Knoppix CD from 2004 and found some Ubuntu-specific bootstrap instructions. Side note: Ubuntu needs to make links to their install manuals more visible; it was difficult to find them. The bootstrap went fairly smoothly, though re-configuring everything was painful.

Good thing I keep most of my data and work on a separate partition called /stuff. This means that if my main partition goes under, all I have to do to get my data back is wipe / and restore a few symlinks like ~/Documents, ~/personal-site, and ~/proj.

After 2 days, I have the following things back to normal.

• Emacs
• RSS reader
• Kazehakase (web browser)
• MusicPD (music player) — I even managed to update my custom Ubuntu package for the newest release candidate
• The /etc directory, thanks to my backups using GNU Arch, though I've since migrated them to bzr because the latter does not stick a metadata directory in every single subdirectory
• Most of /home/mwolson, same as /etc

The following things are still on the TODO list.

• XFCE configuration (scrounge from work machine) — being without both focus-follows-mouse and the right sidebar is painful. I'll also need to add the relevant stuff to revision control so that it gets restored properly next time.
• Figure out whether I added any diary events since the last backup
• leafnode (news caching daemon) — this one will be painful because I have to manually edit newsrc.eld to get rid of the marks for all newsgroups, otherwise new stuff will show up as already read. Editing files with veeery long lines really stretches the editor. Even vi and nano don't like absurdly long lines — Emacs does a better job, but searching forward is slow. Gnus really needs to pretty-print this stuff :^/ .