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Articles
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"It Was a Dark & Stormy Night"
by Janis Kracht, 1:261/38, janis@ filegate.net

Forgive me if I use a well known example of 'bad writing' made
famous by woof icon "Snoopy" as the title of this article...

Sadly that's about where my brain is at given the mentally
exhausting events of last evening... It was NOT stormy - IIRC,
the temperature hovered at a pleasant 42F at the warmest part of
the day... even the evening lows were not so cold for the
middle of January. So my system did not overheat, it did not
lose power suddenly from some wicked thunderstorm, snowstorm or
other weather event... it just decided at some time around
5:30PM EST to suddenly 'give up the ghost' so to speak.

"No problem", I figured, "I'll just reboot" - something I've had
to do on this system several times a week most recently. At
times I said to myself 'this is not good...'. I could hear the
death throes of this singular HD in my system more often this
week and it made sense to me... I've had this one drive that
powers <<Prism for what seems an eternity in this box. And I
have a 'new' system waiting in the wings with clean HDs and an
essential Linux upgrade sitting right next to me. I'd just need
a few cables, a quiet evening and I could do the new Linux and
BBBS/Li install.

The first reboot (there were several last night) would not even
complete... "Ok, I'll shut the system OFF for 5 minutes and try
again; "Alexa", I said speaking to the witch device sitting next
to me, "set a timer for 5 minutes". Then, Plonk, I hit the
power button and was amazed at the quiet in the room.

That reboot didn't work as disconnected sceens of various stages
of the reboot seemed to fly by on my desktop screen.

Then waiting about 10 minutes after that for the next reboot
didn't work either.. Twice or maybe even three times more, it's
quite a blur now in stark daylight today, didn't work either. I
had to let my downlinks know that this could be more than a few
hours downtime; worst case maybe even a few days :(

I grabbed my handy tablet that I NEVER use, and looked at my
tablet's gmail contacts list for someone who could maybe post a
message in various echos as to "Where's <<Prism?" - My good
friend Marc Lewis, 1:396/45, was in my gmail contact list, so I
could email him and hope he was home relaxing with his adorable
kitty. Now I just had to remember how to send an email with
_that_ blasted device without fat-fingering everything I
entered.

"I have time - it's early in the evening, I'll get dinner out of
the way and continue", I thought. I had a pot of chilli I'd
made yesterday afternoon so we could eat NY Style Chili Dogs
topped with grated NY Sharp Cheddar cheese for dinner. "That
will take up some time, by then this box WILL obey."

HA --- It didn't.

"Just shut it down and leave it for a while - a LONG while", Ron
suggested so I did. Rather than fight with the hardware, I read
one of my favorite gardening books (Crockett's Victory Garden,
by James Underwood Crockett - it REALLY is the best out there
even though it is now out of print.)

In the meantime Marc replied with some helpful tips,
certainly helpful at that point as I became more and more
frustrated with Linux and this box :(

Then magically almost (by now it had been several hours since
the first reboot), or perhaps because the system knew I was
serious this time (I swear I did NOT seriously think about
bashing my fist into the metal linux box sitting next to my desk
<grin>), the system did what it was supposed to do and just.....
rebooted the way it should have all those previous times last
night.

I ran the script on my system to put the BinkD mailer back
online - good, no problem.

I ran the script on my system to put BBBS's mailer back online -
Geez so simple... and I went to sleep around 1:30AM, hoping the
daemons that had haunted all those bad earlier reboots were
finally at rest...

I feel like last night ended just like some bad sci-fi movies
finish, with the sun appearing showing a bright happy new day
after a storm. I know I still have to take care of that new
install at some point today, but hey... once I get enough
coffee in me today, even that will seem simple and easy to do.
Time to get the 'gazette out, a day late :)

P.S. Thank you again so much Marc for being there last night,
offering hardware, advice and most of all general 'hand holding'
:) You are the best!!














FIDOGAZETTE Vol 14 No 03 Page 2 January 15th, 2020


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--- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
* Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)