Rescued ....

We had two power outages today at home. The second one was about 45 minutes long. The worst part was it zapped my master boot record on my mythtv Fedora 9 machine. When I tried to boot it just printed:

"GRUB"

and stopped. This normally would have caused a great deal of panic in the old days, since I used to believe this wasn't recoverable. However, this is actually pretty easy to fix. I had already recently created a Fedora 9 respin using jigdo. I burned that and booted the computer in rescue mode.

Then did:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

and then tried to do:

grub-install

but it gave me:

"does not have any corresponding BIOS drive"

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

Took a long time but eventually worked.

Next, started up grub and did:

root( hd0,1 )

setup( hd0 )

Everything worked, and I was able to boot ok!

Cleaning up rpm duplicates

Every once in awhile I'd have one of my linux boxes crashing during a yum update. If yum doesn't have a chance to do cleanup, it will leave a bunch of duplicate rpms that will totally mess up yum and it's dependency resolution. I used to have this rpm one-liner a colleague had come up with to list duplicates, then would manually remove them. This was a pretty not-fun process.

Well, apparently there's a tool that does this for you:

package-cleanup --cleandupes

package-cleanup --dupes

will list any duplicates. This is in the rpm yum-utils. I wonder when this was added?

When good food goes wrong ...

Had the worst case of food poisoning on Saturday night. It was either the Dim Sum we had Saturday afternoon, or the steak and salmon a friend cooked for me Saturday night. In either case, the symptoms were the most violent I've ever experienced, and for several days. My wife actually insisted I go to the ER (which, of course, was a total waste). I'm only now starting to feel anywhere close to normal. I don't think you'll see me at Dim Sum for quite a while ....