Thursday 20 April 2006

Electric Easter

Easter Sunday started with a power cut. Unfortunately it wasn't as clean cut as that sounds - it was more a prolonged power dwindle. The lights flickered at about half voltage as I ran around the house switching off the all the computers.

The fault appeared to be just outside our neighbours' house and took most of the day for the electric company to fix. As usual we spent the time playing board games and enjoying the enforced low-tech entertainment.

The pain occurred when the power came back on (no not through electrocution). I found that my MythTV box (recently upgraded to Fedora Core 5) wouldn't boot. The fluctuating electrical supply seems to have managed to strategically uninstall large chunks of Linux. Most of Gnome desktop was missing along with the login screen and many of the installed packages.

I guess the JFS spotted the problems on the first boot and tidied itself up, as there don't appear to be any disk problems - just missing files!

Anyway, I think it's going to be easier to reinstall from scratch than to try and work out which files are missing from each installed package.

I guess that's my next weekend planned out then :(

Saturday 15 April 2006

More Downtime

Okay, now I've done the sensible thing and put Rails into the vendor folder - after a couple of weeks of no site.

That should stop any further problems occurring thanks to my hosting company upgrading (as they should) to the latest version.

Mind you, the latest version includes the capacity to Freeze to a specific version, which should stop this sort of thing happening again.