Technology is evil

Today started out relatively painless. Notice I said “started out”. At lunch my co-worker and friend Kendall announced to me that he was leaving for another job. That’s a pretty tough one to take, as he has been my right hand, my buffer, my creative consultant, and etc… etc… for the past 5 years. I don’t blame him at all for it as the new job pays a lot more than here. Well that made me less interested in working. At that point another friend asked me if I knew anything about private IM systems he could use in his office. I suggested Jabber and after a while we decided I could toss it on one of his servers for him. I started the process not really thinking much of it as I have done this sort of thing more times than I can count. Of course when I went to install it there were a couple needed libraries and such that were out dated so I downloaded then and started their compile. About halfway though the compile the system gave me a “insufficient disk space message” I’ve run into that before and just went to delete the original tar.gzips for the libraries I was working on to free up space and that’s when I discovered that “rm” would not work. I got the response “sh: rm command not found” Excuse me? Uh ok… I type: “ls /bin” and hit enter. “sh: ls command not found” WTF?!?!?!?!? At this point I was panicked pretty badly. So I notified the owner of said server and he tried his website on the server… nothing… I tried logging in on a second session on the box: nothing. We sheepishly tried a reboot and no real surprise the system will no longer boot. CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I apologized profusely for the trouble and vowed I will fix it and have it back up and better than before. So I will be getting the box this weekend to rebuild it. I can only assume the hard drive died in the middle of the compile I was working on. That or once again there was a mysterious memory fry…
Having talked to a couple other techies they too agree with my initial diagnosis so at least I don’t think it’s anything I did wrong. As I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have done.

Advertisement