Chris Johnston

This past Saturday, I went on what I thought would be a simple little quest: to find a CMOS battery for my linux server. By the end of the day I had done a full reinstall of White Box Linux onto my server and still had not changed the CMOS battery.I started this little quest by going to one of my favorite computer stores to see if they sold CMOS batteris, they were sold out. Finally after the forth store I had a CMOS battery. I also tried to by a stack of DVD-R discs at this store, but they could not get their Interac machine to work so I just bought the battery (their loss), which turned out to be the wrong kind. You would think that motherboard manufactures would have standardized on one single kind of battery. Anyway, since I still wanted to buy some DVD-R’s and some other hardware, I went back to the first store that I had visited. There I bought a spindle of DVD-R discs, a new DVD-rom drive and a Western Digital 120GB hard drive, the later two for my linux server.

When I finally got home, I had two new peices of hardware to install into my very stable, perfectly configured linux server. How hard could it be? Actually, once I found some instructions online — from one of the Red Hat manuals — I was able to get the second hard drive partitioned, formated and installed, so not really all that hard after all. I added the new drive to my Samba config and was able to access it from my other computers. So far eveything was going great. Then the trouble began.

As I was moving some backup files onto the new drive, I noticed that I was very quickly loosing commands. The first one to go was the ‘clear’ command. This was not a good sign. I closed the shell I was using and opened another one and found more commands had vanished. In the end, I the privilege of slowly watching my /usr directory suffer a complete meltdown.

I am sure that a RHCE would have known exactly what to do in this situation to save the computer, but I am not one, so a reinstall was my only real solution. The only problem was that there were some files in my home directory that I didn’t want to loose. Thankfully, I have a burned copy of Knoppix. This allowed me to boot into the computer and ftp the files I needed to my website. Then I did a reinstall. So far everything seems to be working fine, but I have a lot of work ahead of me to get the server back to were it was.

The only good side of this whole experience is that I was able to fix some mistakes I made in the partitioning. Other than that, I think this past weekend was mostly a disaster. I have got to learn more about how Red Hat and Linux works.

Endnote: I did finally find a cmos battery that would work in my server — at Radio Shack.