So all week I’ve been constructing “Mass,” the replacement to the machine we call “Lancelot.” I’m running Linux From Scratch 4.0, built carefully to exacting specifications to do a set of tasks very efficiently.

And this afternoon I screwed it all up. You see, because I’m an idiot I forgot to enable a particular valuable function in the kernel. Upon compiling and installing the new kernel, I realized I’d never run LILO from inside of the LFS install before. Coupled with some strangeness related to the Promise IDE controller, I’m now seeing this when I boot the machine:

L 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 (and so on)

Great. Just lovely. So the boot record is screwed up and I can’t seem to get it back.

Time to start all over again. From scratch. And in the meantime we have no proxy server, no email gateway, no traffic graphing. I guess we know what I’m doing this weekend, don’t we?

If you need me I’ll be in my office, resisting the urge to put my head through the window by main force. All weekend.