Debian
Last night I installed updates on my FreeNAS box and rebooted it. As expected my network died, but then it never came back, which I hadn’t expected.
My FreeNAS box provides backup storage space, a local Debian mirror and a mirror of talks from recent conferences. It also runs a couple of virtual machines and one of these provides my local DNS resolver.
I hooked up the VNC console to the virtual machine and the problem looked to be that it was booting from the Debian installer CD.
Update: I’ve had an offer of a used workstation that I’m following up. I would still appreciate any donations to go towards costs for cables/converters/upgrades needed with the new system but the hard part should hopefully be out the way now. (:
Thanks for all the responses I’ve received about the death of my desktop PC. As I updated in my previous post, I find it unlikely that I will have to orphan any of my packages as I believe that I should be able to get a new workstation soon.
On Sunday, in my weekly report on my free software activities, I wrote about how sustainable my current level of activites are. I had identified the risk that the computer that I use for almost all of my free software work was slowly dying. Last night it entered an endless reboot loop and subsequent efforts to save it have failed.
I cannot afford to replace this machine and my next best machine has half the cores, half the RAM and less than half of the screen real estate.