[attrition] State of the Attrition Address

[security curmudgeon]

http://attrition.org/news/content/05-12-25.001.html

State of the Attrition Address
Sun Dec 25 13:49:45 EST 2005
Attrition Staff

As you may have noticed, Attrition has had a bit of downtime lately. The 
problems began when the box started powering off with no warning. This 
lead to no logs, nothing on the console screen and no indication of what 
the problem may be. Due to the sudden loss of power, file systems were not 
properly unmounted and it played havoc with fsck and booting. The only way 
to get the machine to boot was to have our NOC run fsck by hand several 
times on each drive (a 25 minute process). This would last between one and 
three hours on average, causing a significant amount of downtime.

Since the box supports several projects and is the base of email for many 
people, this had to be fixed sooner than later. Lyger researched and 
coordinated for a new machine to be sent to Jericho who would handle the 
base installation and configuration. Since Jericho has had several stable 
SuSE 8.1 machines, he figured another would work just fine. The first shot 
at getting the OS installed worked fine. The default SuSE 8.1 kernel 
worked for the most part (including eth0), but didn't have all the options 
needed. The latest 2.4.x kernel compiled fine, but wouldn't boot. The ever 
present "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs" was not very helpful 
in figuring out exactly why it wouldn't play nice. In an attempt to 
maximize time, kernel reconfiguring was put on the back burner, the known 
good default kernel back in place, and he could keep working on the rest 
of the software such as rot13, nethack and figlet. In theory.

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