2004-10-03-2337Z


Unnerving. Got a RAC job, and after a few minutes of working on it, the damned server crashed. Hard. It's still not back up, hours later. Racking my brain to figure out what I might have done to cause the problem, but nothing seems to fit. I wonder if someone at the data center just happened to accidentally pull the power plug at that moment, or if there was a cracker in the machine and when he saw me su to root, panicked and wiped the box. Even if it wasn't my fault, the data center could pin the blame on me if it was their error, and I won't have any way to prove I wasn't culpable. Ditto if a cracker rm -rf /'d it.

It's a shame, because the job was going well; I might have been able to beat minimum wage on it. Which for RAC is amazing.

In other news: no progress with the PXE boot, due to my complexity threshold being reached. Gone back to postforth-2 for a while, trying different things to see if I can simplify it to the point where I can feel comfortable with it. I've thought of some kernel-hacking projects too. Maybe make a syscall for tftp, since it's already in there anyway. There are probably hundreds of usable routines in the kernel that could conceivably be accessed via syscall, rather than duplicate the code in userland. Of course there are voices in my head screaming "Baaaaadddd idea!!!!!", but I'm ignoring them. Also make a meta-syscall in which the first parameter is the name of the call you want, e.g. EAX=__NR_meta, EBX="READ", ECX=fd, EDX=*buffer, ESI=count. That way, I can significantly reduce the symbols that have to be in postFORTH.

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