...Shortly before 0100, Wen (whom we didn't realize had grown tall enough to do so) put the blue stool next to the back table in the office, climbed up on it, reached up, and pushed the button labelled '0' on the front panel of the UPS. This resulted in a loud CLICK, sudden darkness, dead silence apart from the sound of many hard drives spinning down all at once, and great consternation and dismay between myself and Cymru.
The blue stool has now been confiscated. Over the next 45 minutes or so, we brought machines back up and repaired machines. Llioness wouldn't finish booting because fsck, for reasons that are still unknown, was dynamically linked to libgcc_1.so, which was not available. Fortunately, we had a set of Slackware 9.1 CDs around, courtesy of our friend Snack, and llioness's problems were solved by the simple expedient of installing the Slackware 9.1 e2fsprogs package. A quick series of manual fscks, a reboot, and llioness was happy. Babylon5 started up fine, but a few services failed to start, necessitating a little troubleshooting. I then decided that since I had them there, I'd upgrade babylon5's core utilities to Slackware 9.1 from source (why install i486-optimized binaries when I could compile my own Athlon-optimized ones?) from the Slackware 9.1 CDs. I also made sure as I was doing this that everything I consider crucial was statically linked. This process went fine until, watching coreutils make install, I realized it wasn't doing what I'd intended. It being by now way too late at night and both of us dog-tired, I figured I'd just do it over, and ran a make uninstall.
print (defined $HOMER_SIMPSON ? "DOH!" : "Oops.");
Fortunately, I have Bacula running, doing nightly incremental backups, so I was able to just restore /bin, then do it over. With babylon5 stable again, we went to bed at last. This morning, after finding and fixing a minor glitch (something in the coreutils make install set $HOSTNAME to '-s', causing auth to break all over the place in assorted ways), I finished the job, installing jfs and xfs tools, upgraded reiserfs tools and linux-utils, and a few other essentials without further incident. I figure this'll hold me until I bite the bullet and do a full upgrade to Slackware 9.1
There is an ancient Chinese mixed benison and curse: "May you live in interesting times." It doesn't specify "with children," but maybe it should.
