[gentoo-soc] GSoC - Upstart Progress report #1

[gentoo-soc] GSoC - Upstart Progress report #1

[Oliver Schinagl]

Hey all,

Here is my first status update. And let me tell you, it couldn't have 
gone worse.

After bad news, there is worse news.

I finally had a qemu setup running on my laptop (which runs Ubuntu 10.04 
on an age old pentium-m that doesn't do hardware virt) and was getting 
into installing a bare stage3 to be my starting point. I had also 
checked out the OpenRC and Upstart repositories and was working through 
them to figure out what they do, and how they work. I did all this on an 
external USB IDE disk, as I have a really small SSD in my laptop. I was 
figureing, once I have something workable, I'll store it on my server as 
a backup and sources in a git repository.

Two days ago, I decided to run a mandatory fsck.ext4 on my harddisk, to 
make sure all was still well, after unplugging the disk a few times and 
what not. Just a precaution I figured really. So an hour later, my drive 
was empty. There was some left over gunk in lost+found; but everything 
was gone. Of course I didn't expect things to be possibly that bad.

But things have gotten worse! Yesterday, coming home from the weekend 
over at my GF's place, I wanted to turn on my desktop. Nothing. The 
power led came on, and that was it. No fans spinning, no harddisks 
spinning, nothing. After using the multi-meter and shortening the 
power_on pins, I can only find 3.3V on the +5VSB line and the rest ... 
nothing. So my trusty old Zalman may have finally died. I contacted 
Zalman for an RMA, but if shipping is to expensive, I may just buy a new 
one :S

Wait, there is more. For some reason, the last 2 weeks (after 2 weeks 
running fine) 1 disk keeps dropping from my raid array in my server. 
/dev/sdi just stops existing. Either the LSI controller, or the disk is 
to blame, so the disk is now running from the primary port on the 
motherbord.

Lots of broken stuff, in just a few short days. Luckly, my laptop still 
works (for now).

Oliver