Category: Rant

Some months ago, the first virtual console on my home Linux box became “stuck” and wouldn’t respond. It wasn’t too much of an inconvenience so I didn’t bother much about it. A couple of days ago, I noticed that neither the CD drive nor the DVD burner was responding. Ok, I figured, I’ll have to schedule a reboot to fix that. Then last night’s backup failed when internal drive that my rack mount server backs up to suddenly decided it was read-only. I unmounted it, remounted it and it was ok. I restarted the backup and everything appeared to be running fine. But then a few hours later I noticed the CPU was pegged and two rsync processes were going crazy. Evidently the backup is screwing up again. I killed the backup, and decided I reboot it again as soon as I got home.

I was reluctant to take this step for a couple of reasons – first, it has 159 days of uptime. Second, it has always been a bitch to reboot. In the old days, it just wouldn’t recognize all the drives every time. Putting in a really really powerful power supply mostly cured that problem, but now it shows the BIOS screen showing all the disks, but then it just sits there not going any further. I can usually fix it with the reset button or power cycle.

I got home and found my office door had been closed, and so it was baking hot in the room with my computer. And when I rebooted, it wouldn’t come up. I’ve tried many of my old tricks, and it’s still not booting. I’m going to let it cool down, but if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll be shopping for another server. Problem is, I don’t *need* a new server. The current one has plenty of processing power, memory, and most importantly, lots of disk space. I suppose I’d like something that’s more energy efficient, but otherwise I don’t know what to shop for in these days.

As I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Dear Boss, my boss has a stick up his ass about my DocumentCache, and blames it for any problems with the cinlib long before any evidence comes in, and continues to do so time after time years after the last time it was actually a problem.

So yesterday we were discussing a problem and Tony asked for something new to be put in the DocumentCache, and the head of QA starts saying “I don’t want you guys messing with DocumentCache so close to the release date because it always seems to be causing problems”. AAARRGGGGHHHH!!!! I patiently explained that, no, the DocumentCache hasn’t had a bug against it in three years, it’s just a matter of perception because every time there is a bug anywhere near that part of the code “somebody” (I didn’t say Dave’s name) thinks it’s a DocumentCache bug even though it never turns out to be the case that it is.

The next time I write something that caches something, I’m not going to use the word “Cache” in its name. I’m going to call it the XMLPuppyAndKittenPlayground or something.