My easter egg with a bad surprise was the failiure of the Xen server and any domain it hosted, after I tried to change a password … the easter egg with a nice surprise was having a long walk with Nicole, which turned more wholehearted than I had hoped for. If only I wouldn’t catch myself thinking about what might be …Last thursday our professor wanted to start a small server he had written on one of our pool computers, so I tried to reset the password noone could remember … unfortunately the web frontend borked with a „no space left on device“ error. /tmp had filled up?!? Listing the free diskspace linux reported ~5Gig availiable ~4Gig used and 0 bytes free. WTF? I created a file with a few bytes of content, and the used space increased accordingly. Deleting the file decreased the usage correctly, but it would not raise free space above 0. I scanned for errors with fsck … the ext3 filesystem had quite some errors, nothing too serious though – shutdown the xen domain fsck the root filesystem and then restart the domain. Since no student was working in the pool I issued the shutdown command from within the domain, repaired the filesystem and tried to start the domain with „xm create“ … unfortunately, it did not find some needed xen python scripts … the old xen ebuild was no longer in portage, so I had to update the xen server. This is where I did not think long enough … I was too optimistic with xen as my experience with installing it the previous time were, while time consuming, straight forward.
I made the bill without the linux kernel guys, which currently seem to like to hack at the serial ATAT drivers in the stable branch 2.6.16 resulting in the new kernel not beeing able to find the connected SATA drive until I would change the BIOS mode from „enhanced“ to „compatibility“ mode and append some nearly undocumented kernel boot parameters. My mood brightened when I saw gentoos init spill out boot messages. I darkened again when the domain would not receive an IP via DHCP. Not even after trying every driver availiable for that network card, and even installing a precompiled version from the official xen tarballs. The time my mood hit the bottom it was saturday 2 a.m. and I was out of options.
The next morning I made the choice not to think about being responsible for laying waste to our infrastructure, and instead try to enjoy easter. I went to see my father and found myself in a group of people, where everyone was at least twice my age … somehow they managed to not talk about their bad back and worse knees and instead stayed focused on things I had more experience with and enjoy the cake 😉
After they had left I altered the telephone and internet setup to their liking, and we were off to a late dinner at an italian retaurant.
Sunday, I stayed with my mom and in the evening met with my friends who were also in Hannover. I had been looking forward for the easter fire, but after it had rained a few hours we agreed on watching DVD and / or go to the cinema. It was nice to see all of them again, an I am looking forward to summer, where we can meet outside and have barbecues 😉
Monday I met with Nicole to have a walk around the Maschsee and a cup of coffee afterwards. Luckily the sun came out after all morning had been shades of gray. Well, we had one cup before and one after she let me talk her into really circling the sea. I very much enjoyed the company, but I do not know when I will be in Hanover again to repeat the little trip. For now, I am satisfied with the friendship that has developed and will try to live up to some of my expectations now that I see a reason. Although I catch myself bathing in the longing for comfort, trust and love, I think I realized enough to not get again carried away with what might be, but instead enjoy this relationship as it lasts.
Anyway, I have enough work to keep me busy for the next month or two with the semester just starting. Seems I was too stupid to get my courses organized efficiently … I’ll talk to some people in charge, maybe there is a chance to fix things up…