Administrative

Computer Disaster Update

13 Comments

For those following my travails yesterday, there’s good news, and bad news (and the bad news may be really bad). This morning, it finally logged me in, but it takes half a forever from the time I type in the password and I actually get a desktop. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I can’t find my old data where I backed it up yesterday.

I had backed it up to a file system on sdb3. But when I went to look for it today after logging in, /dev/sdb3 no longer exists. All there is is /dev/sdb1. And when I try to mount it I get the message “type lvm2pv not recognized.” Just how screwed am I?

[Update]

I’m hosed. Sort of, depending on whether or not I can find a wizard. Fedora decided, without asking me, to format both my drives as a single file system. The data’s still there, but not easily found. To top it off, the second drive is dying (which I didn’t learn until this morning). So I’ve shut down the machine, and am going out to buy a new big drive, load a fresh OS on it (without the other drives present), and then see how to go about the recovery. Fortunately, the data is redundant on both drives, which may make it a little easier to find, even with the superblocks and tables munged.

[Update mid afternoon]

In doing the new install, I’m pretty confident that I fornicated with the canine. It probably asked me if I wanted to format both drives, and I didn’t look carefully enough at what it was asking me. But Fedora started the whole thing…

Administrative

Computer Disaster

27 Comments

Well, maybe that’s too strong a word, but my main work station (running Fedora Core 10) froze up today. I could move the cursor around on the screen, but nothing else. I ended up doing a hard reboot, after which it refused to boot, hanging after dragging the bar across the bottom of the screen. I’ve booted into rescue mode, but I have no idea how to fix it, because I don’t know what the problem is. I may trying to do a reinstall with the net install disk that I used to rescue, but I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas how to diagnose?

For those wondering, I’m posting from my laptop (which has its own problems, because the wireless isn’t working, and I have to find a place for it in my office where I can plug it in to ethernet).

[Update early afternoon]

I’m downloading Knoppix, because I’m having trouble with fsck from the rescue disk. It boots into level 3, though, so it may be an XWindows problem.

[Update a few minutes later]

No, it doesn’t go into level 3, it only boots single user.

[Early evening update]

Well, I backed up my data, and upgraded from Core 10 to Core 11. Whatever the problem was, the upgrade didn’t fix it. It acts just the same, except it says “Fedora 11” in the lower-right corner of the screen, instead of 10. It doesn’t complete the boot.

I guess I have to just do a clean installation, and recover from backup.

[Update a few minutes later]

D’oh!!!!!!!!!

I noticed when it shut down that it reported a bad line in /etc/fstab. I rescued, vi’d in, and noticed that I’d added a line to attempt to mount a remote drive, but had apparently screwed it up. This is the first time that I’d attempted a boot since I did that, weeks ago. So the screen freeze had nothing to do with the booting problem, other than it caused me to reboot. I deleted the line, and it looks like its coming up now. So I wasted a day on this. OTOH, I did do the upgrade, which I’d been meaning to anyway.

[Update a few minutes later]

Spoke too soon. It acted different, but it still won’t boot. At the end of the day, I’m still stuck with a white bar across the bottom of the screen. I’ll make one more attempt to look at the logs, and then just do a clean install of 11.

[Mid-evening update]

OK, I am officially infuriated.

I did a clean install of Core 11 over my previous Core 10. Everything went fine, except the friggin’ thing will not let me log in. I assigned a password for me (it didn’t ask for one for root), and when I use it, it just sits there. Forever. When I pull up a text window (ctrl-alt-F1) it asks for a password, then delays for a long time, then returns to a login prompt.

There are no words for how angry and frustrated I am…

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

About Those Green Shoots In The Economy

27 Comments

It would help a lot of the government wouldn’t keep stomping them down.

But you can’t waste a crisis, and if you haven’t accomplished everything you want with it yet politically, you have to sustain it, just as the Roosevelt administration did, for years. Let’s hope that we’ll be on to them this time around.

[Update a few minutes later]

Will we be saved by California?

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat…

…The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.

The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.

Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.

Well, it does to some of the economic illiterati in my comments section. As I said, let’s hope the rest of us figure it out by next November.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

A Crack In The Regime?

4 Comments

There seems to be a civil war brewing among the Iranian clerics:

“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”

The president will be very disappointed. He was so looking forward to discussing nuclear weapons with Ahmadinejad and demonstrating the power of his silver tongue. What will he do if he doesn’t have a comfortable, familiar dictator to prostrate himself before? These damned people, wanting their freedom. They’re so inconvenient.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Fort Lauderdale

2 Comments

We went downtown this morning to the tea party by the federal building on Broward. It wasn’t a huge turnout (my guess is that there were not more than three or four hundred people at any given time) but the crowd was enthusiastic, and creative with their signs, with a lot of cars driving up and down the street with their own signs, bullhorns and car horns. It was mostly a fiscal protest. I saw only one “Choose Life” sign, and a couple related to foreign policy. There was no obvious news coverage.

I shot video of this band playing some Dixieland. I may Youtube it later.

A little street theater.

The other Barry.

This guy say’s he’s running for Senator as an Independent. He doesn’t have a web site yet, but he’s got a few months to get started. He’s Jewish, born in Brooklyn during the war, and claims to have known Jack Kennedy, who he said wouldn’t recognize the Democrats today. “The Chicago machine has taken over the country. Obama is a Stalinist, and knows exactly where he wants to go. I’ve known a lot like him in my day.”

Can’t accuse him of not being a straight talker.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Think Waxman-Markey Won’t Kill Jobs?

10 Comments

Ask the manufacturers:

More than 17 percent of those who answered said they would have to shut down their business because there is no way they could handle the kinds of increases being predicted.

The unscientific poll taken of Manufacturing & Technology eJournal readers from June 28th through July 1st drew 943 responses.

OTHER CHOICES INCLUDED:

Would raise the price of my product or service to customers (22 percent);

A combination of price increases, personnel cuts and reductions in pay and benefits (20 percent);

Switch to a 4-day workweek (15 percent);

Layoff workers (14.5 percent).

But hey, what do they know?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!