fred avolio's musings

Yes, I am old and some of you will not remember HAL 9000, from 2001: A Space Odessy, but the older folks will remember that line.

I have 2 Linux boxes in the house. One is a new one that I use to stage my web site (and as my workstation when my PowerBook disappointed me for the first time (see My Mac Let Me Down (Sort of)). The other is built in an old (former) Gauntlet computer I bought from my excellent friend, Allen, and it is in the basement. I recently decided to shut it down. I am not using it and it is just using power. It has been up for 58 days since a power outage that lasted longer than the UPS battery. When the power came back, so did the basement Linux system.

I tried. It refuses to die. Observe.

# uptime
6:03pm up 58 days, 2:25, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
# shutdown -h now


Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Thu Dec 6 18:28:41 2007):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
[zkmem](1.1)
idt=0xffffe000, Can’t find sys_call_table[]
#

Uh, oh. It won’t shutdown. I am going down to the basement in a few minutes. If I never blog again, well…

I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

Yeah. Right.