The third strike finally landed. Debbie got hit.

I've run out of things I can do to fix her. I keep getting the same error message, #100. I still haven't found a way to manually or automatically patch what's busted with dpkg, apt-get, aptitude or Synaptic. I've used su and gedit to get into the files and try to re-write some of the settings but I haven't found enough documentation that is clear enough, at least to me, to be sure I'm not breaking more than fixing the system.

The symptoms remain the same. Samba and SWAT are busted with version and dependency conflicts. I've tried turning them off. It seems I can't un-install them. There is obviously a lot I need to learn about Debian Linux. Unless I can figure something out in the next few days, the plan is to copy off all the stored files onto DVDs and wipe the system and start over. The two critical components are Samba and some sort of update facility. Right now apt-get seems as busted as Samba.

I wrote that last night, now its 4AM local time. I'm up courtesy of the very noisy thunderstorm that just blew through town.

I've re-started all the systems, Debbie included. She didn't restart. Even with a UPS to isolate the system something must have gotten through before I shutdown the systems last night.

Unfortunately a constant online UPS the size I need (approximately 3KVA) is out of the budget and I've been using the stand-by battery backup sort of UPS. My previous experience has indicated that they just don't deal with thunderstorms as well as they should. That is why I have been shutting the systems down when I know storms are about. The battery backup “UPS” is decent for switching transients and similar events on the AC mains but not lightning. We've been having little micro-cell storms that are coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. Yes summer has finally started. The rains have been warm and the winds from the south. This most recent batch of storms the last few days has been an expensive experience.

One of them evidently took out Debbie, the system drive, hda, has been trashed. It manages to get about half way through the boot process and then hangs.

So in the interests of getting a working Linux server system back up and running, I'll do a complete re-install. I probably should have done that anyway. I still have a working Linux desktop system, Debbie's little sister, SugarBear was turned off and avoided getting trashed. The linux firewall is still running obviously!

My daughter's Windows XP Pro system has a dead hard drive but that was only a matter of time, it has a Hitachi DeathStar PATA drive in it and and it was one I resurrected from the trash at work. I'll get a “new” one and drop an image I've kept onto the replacement drive. I fixed my son's XP machine last week and it seems to still be running. My home office XP Pro development workstation is ok. BTW none of the XP machines are running SP3, they've been patched up with SP2+ to within the last couple of months but I've learned my lesson! If I decide to update them to SP3, updates after that will be direct connects to Windows Update website.

Now I have to find my Debian CDROM collection and start building DebbieToo.