The Computer Gods are Angry with Me

So Wednesday was pretty productive scientifically. Several projects showed interesting results, after rather lengthy periods of inactivity. Yay, science! It seems like science happens rarely these days, it's nice to actually get some research done.

So I get into the office yesterday, ready to capitalize on a productive Wednesday and really start pushing back the frontiers of the Universe. I sit down in front of swayback (my workstation), fire up my mail reader, and get the response

Terminal type 'xterm' unrecognized.

Say what? I mean, I know what it means, but its the same terminal type I've used for the past 15+ years of my life. Today you have a problem with it? What gives?

So I muck around a little bit and try and fire up a text editor

emacs: command not found

What? The text editor I've also used for years? Look pal, all this stuff worked fine when I went home last night. What's up?

So I kill the whole windowing system and drop into the console. Except I don't drop into the console. The screen goes blank and sits there. No response. No remote logins accepted. A blank screen.

So what's left to do? All together now: Power cycle!


So I punch swayback's power button, and it happily starts to reboot. Immediately upon checking the disks, the message from hell comes up. Yes, that message. That message that causes your whole body to pucker up and start secreting cold clammy sweat from every pore:

File system error; please enter the system password to run fsck manually

Now fsck is only one letter away from how I'm feeling at this point, because everyone knows when you get that message, the computer is toast.

She's going down, Captain -- abandon ship!

So I call in the marines (i.e. our system manager Charley), grab my laptop, and head to class. When I get out of class, Charley confirms the worst: swayback's system disk is dead. Finito. Kaput. Ready for a new life as a doorstop.

Now happily, Charley has also been backing up my home directory every night, so the data on that disk is not lost. But swayback needs a new system disk and system install -- basically a complete brain transplant (I'm having flashbacks to old Star Trek episodes at this point...). And then the backup copy of my home directory gets laid back in place. But of course, swayback is now an idiot savant -- a newly installed system, my data in place, but all the applications missing. I can't do much of anything, and it's going to be a slow road back, bringing all the software back to life. (Yes, I can edit in vi, and yes I can use mailx to mail -- but that's painful, jack!)

Now bless Charley for rescuing it as quickly as he did, I clearly could have been in really deep trouble without his valiant work (as he was rushing to leave for the observatory in the afternoon, I might add).

But then as I sat down with the reinstalled swayback, I noticed something odd. There were a bunch of files there that I had deleted months and months ago. And now they were back! All my new files, too, nothing was missing, but there were legions of old files suddenly resurrected from the past. My computer was being haunted by the reanimated corpses of long dead files -- what the heck?

An army of dead log files return from the grave...

So it turns out we're using rsync to backup our directories, which means deleted files never really get deleted -- they are archived indefinitely. And if we have to restore from the archive, the past comes back at you in full force. (If only the White House computers used rsync -- but I digress...)

So anyway, I now have a new hobby. Aside from bringing swayback back up to full functionality (Help me, Charley!), I get to go back and delete a years worth of files that need to be re-deleted.

And to think that, for a brief tiny moment of time, I was finally getting some science done for a change....