Got up, ate breakfast, read my e-mail, drove to work and realized that my server, ‘SHODAN’, from which I had gotten my e-mail only minutes ago was not responding any more. So I try hunting for it in the usual subnet, thinking that it may just have switched IPs on me and forgotten to update DNS, but it doesn’t turn up. This is of course not good if the damn thing is sitting at home in Luxembourg and I’m several thousands of kilometers away in the US, so I IMed my friend Landaro and had him go have a look at the box.
Sure enough, a short while later he calls me and gives me the shocking news: The server is powered down and won’t come on. We try unplugging it, replugging it, resetting the UPS but to no avail. The machine is dead and won’t start. This would be the moment where I start to panic. All my mail flows through that server, my phone calls go through it, some IRC chatting goes through there and sometimes I also IM through it and now I’m standing in front of the smothering ruins of what was once my umbilical cord to my friends in Europe, that server! Figuratively speaking of course, I’m actually sitting in front of a PC about 6500km to the west of it.
Anyway, the machine’s toast, what now? Well, I do have an old Athlon 700 standing around there, so I grasp the last straw and ask my friend if he can transfer the primary hard drive of the server to that machine and bring it up. The first attempt fails, the system gets stuck with udev not finding the root fs. We flip the HDD from the first connector on the IDE cable to the second one (on the end), that seems to do the trick. The server gets stuck on boot, not finding hdc, which we didn’t transfer. No biggie, just ignore it and the server actually comes up. Of course there’s no network, but I somehow expected that and after some hackery in /etc/network/interfaces, that’s fixed too. Only now do I realize that this box only has a USB v1 controller which poses a problem as most of my storage is on a RAID spread across external USB harddrives. So I have my friend transfer over the USB/PCI card from the old server as well and hook up the RAID there. Perfect! I can just picture SHODAN sending me an e-mail saying ‘Welcome back to Citadel Station’. ;)
Many thanks to Landaro for the quick intervention. I owe you in beer, like one, maybe two … dozens.
If you think about it. This man virtually lives through that machine, and if you see it. It’s just a pile of junk. An old crappy PC you wouldn’t dare to give your worst ennemy as a present. ;)
Pff, real beauty lies inside! ;)
To be exact, the box does look much better when the panels are on and the cabling behind it is neatly arranged… but I really can’t be bothered to do that!