May 26, 2005
Deciphering Computer Woes
It is the time of the year when my PC running Linux decides to go on the fritz. Strangely, the same thing happened almost one year ago. First, the system started suffering from random lock-ups. Then, segmentation faults started occurring. Finally, random reboots occurred. This is all very annoying to say the least. Unlike last year when this happened, I haven't been installing a new latest and greatest kernel ever week nor have I been upgrading software daily. I've been with the same kernel for over two months and I haven't performed many software upgrades lately. So what could be the problem?
The only major change I have made with my computer over the last two months has been upgrading my GCC 3.3.5 to 3.4.x. Because this version isn't as well-tested as the older, I decided to rebuild my system packages with 3.3.5. Still, no luck. I rebuilt my kernel and all the modules with 3.3.5. That only seemed to make things worse somehow. After finally getting a kernel OOPS that I could access, I realized that the problem might reside in one of my hard drives. So here I am, booting off a LiveCD and running fsck on all 7 of my partitions. A few errors have been found on the root Reiserfs partition... enough that I am currently rebuilding the filesystem tree. Just to be sure, I am also rebuilding the trees on my Reiser4 partitions. Something tells me this whole issue is hard drive related... I am not sure what though. It could be related to the fiasco I had with Postfix earlier this month. Somehow, Postfix lost the domain information from DNS and all of my outgoing e-mails (just automated system log updates) got stuck in an exponentially growing queue. I ended up with over 1.2 million files in my Postfix queue! My system was still usable, but it felt sluggish. There were so many files in the queue directories that `rm *` returned "parameter list too long."
Just to be on the safe side, I am going to chroot into my root partition from the LiveCD and bootstrap the system (again). So, in the meantime, my personal web site is down. Along with it is my subversion server. So here I am, stuck with just home improvement to do. I'd post a link to pictures, but the gallery is offline too. Well, at least I have my brand new Dremel 400 XPR to entertain me. Hopefully that toy will keep me busy long enough that I am not tempted to spend the $630 on the DeWALT 6-piece 18V set at Home Depot. It taunts me every time I go there and their free tool by mail-in-rebate makes it even more difficult to resist the tempation. Things will be even worse once I get my first summer paycheck and a contractor payment next week...
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