postmortem

[rone]

I failed to copy over important files in /etc and /var, which means that i lost all my mail aliases (very bad; mail will bounce, but i'm trying to reconstruct them by sifting through bounces in the mail logs), my DNS zones (bad, but the information was minimal and i reconstructed it from memory), and my mail (bad, although it's only the last three months).  My newsspool is also acting wonky, but that's not important.

Looking back on things, i should have known that the problem was the root drive, since the first errors i saw were related to swap getting weird; i disabled the swap partition and that wasn't the end of the woes (which, really, that's just plain bad troubleshooting; if the drive is going bad, simply not using one section of it isn't going to fix anything).  However, after i did all my shuffling about of files, i hammered the drive by rebuilding the OS, and it withstood it fine.  It suckered me and i'm pissed.

Yes, i know, backups.  Right.

Anyway, everything is well now.  Happy new year, bitches.