Real fun day! :) After I woke up, I’ve continued with assembling of the new PC. When I was almost done, Olga came in and suggested that my home network planning and planning of hosts locations was totally wrong. After a bit of thinking I was convinced and started to redo the whole thing. Everything was going fine, until I decided to test it. :) Somehow it happened that I put 230 volts into the power supply while it was switched to operate in 110 volts mode. No surprise the damn thing exploded with a terrible sound, which caused me and Olga to go partially deaf for the rest of the day. Here goes 520 watts.
So, I call up Lev and ask him to come over, so that he could prevent me from doing lots of other stupid things. He kindly agreed, I brought him over and we started playing with the rest of the hardware. My high-tower case was now filled with 4 hard disks, CD-ROM drive, CD writer, Intel Celeron 2GHz processor and 256 megs of RAM. Surprisingly, the whole thing started to work using an old 235 watts power supply. I was extrememly glad until I started noticing lots of strange behavoir. First of all, machine state was totally different with every reboot – even /bin/hostname returned different results. Then things started to go completely insane and I’ve almost lost my mind. Imagine seeing different results from two consequtive runs of /bin/ls! /bin/df was no different.
After doing few things here and there, I found out that it’s time to restore the system from the proper copy of it on another hard disk that I had. Yet again a surprise – files were restored, but all of them were owned by root.root . Excellent! :) This was where I said – enough for today and went to the office. :)