All better

I’m so pleased to announce that I have, with some help from the guy I goto when things look bleak, completely recovered my home automation / file server.

Everything is back to normal, and actually a couple of things are working better.

Thank you Zack!

How did I fix it?

booted to the SLES 9.1 boot CD, ran the recovery mode. From the console there I was able to mount the partition on the system to a temp location. Then I ran “mkinitrd /mnt/oldroot”. mkinitrd ran through the kernel on the mounted partition, and built a new initrd and dumpted it to the ramdisk /boot. I copied it form there to the boot partition on the HDD and rebooted.

Poof! up came my system. Well sorta… The ethernet interface didn’t load, but that was because I had to change out the MB which changed the mac address. A quick rename of the config file and a network services restart gave me back my ethernet connection. I rebooted once more and everything came up fine. I still ahd to do some fidgiting with the X10 controller but got that going too.

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GAAAAH!!! I Hate Computers

Tonight I noticed that the home automation controller computer / fileserver was acting weird. At first the behavior seemed to be just related to the serial communications to the actual powerline controller. This has happened once or twice before and wasn’t ever a real problem. It usually can be solved by power cycling the interface, and restarting the service. I tired that and had no luck. Then I noticed another service was acting odd so I decided that it might be a good idea to reboot.

What the hell was I thinking.

After about 5 minutes I still had no connectivity to the server. So I went to the basement to check on it. Turned on the monitor for the console and heard a high pitched whine, not quite high enough to hurt my ears but close. I turned it off and grumbled. So I went up and got a replacement monitor. Nothing on the display…. I looked at the power switch and noticed no light on it. I thought to myself “Ha! I did a shutdown not a reboot! DUH!”

I clicked the power switch… and heard the system power off. Thats not right…

Clicked it again, and instead of the happy glow of a green led I was greeted with the harsh and nerve wracking glow of yellow. Normally this means bad power supply. So I went and grabbed a spare power supply and put it in only to discover that, oh yeah… thats the one that blew a few months ago and its dead. So I tore apart another computer to scavanged the supply. Put it in the system plugged it all in powered it up and… was again greeted by an every so annoying yellow led… SON OF A!!!

So I went back up and got my spare computer I had been keeping just in case this exact event happened. (same model, make etc) I swapped out the power supply and hard drive from the apparently dead system and put them into the replacement system. (Yes this was the system I scavanged the power supply from)

I turned it on and was greeted with… a happy green LED. Huzzah my troubles are over.

Nope…

Not in John world…

The system got to the grub boot screen, timed out and started the boot process only to tell me ERROR 15, unable to locate file /boot/initrd on (hda0)

DAMN IT!

I tried failsafe… same thing….

At that point I turned things off and said to hell with it.

I came up reconfigured the wrt54G, and am sitting here trying to relax a few more minutes before I try to go to bed.

I’m hoping that tomorrow things will be better, and I’ll be able to discover that its something silly like a broken link to initrd on the boot partition.

That would be nice….

I have a recover CD…

I should be able to mount that partition and fix the link then….

I hope…

If it is the drive going bad… NOT AGAIN!!! I’m going to be purchasing a copy of spinrite and a new hard drive to see if I can recover the data.

There are days when I hate my life…