The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Thu, 24 Oct 1996 18:33:30 +0100
Hiya People...
It's been a while since we had some computer stuff, so here's something
for those of you who miss it...
Wishes & Dreams...
- ANDREA
xx
*************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>*************
*****<ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>*****<bloodaxe@geocities.com>*****
*** ***
*** THE LOONY BIN ***
*** loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk ***
*** Archive: http://eleceng.ukc.ac.uk/~pjw/loonies/ ***
*** ***
*******************Internet Goddess********************
**********************ANDROMEDA************************
------- Forwarded foolishness follows -------
/usr/games/admin
================
(All trademarks acknowledged.)
I was working in the office and the time was getting late
when they told me of the problems that I must investigate
as the PostScript wasn't scripting and the DAT drive had no lights
I could see as it was starting it would be one of those nights.
There were deadlocks in my mutex, all my pointers missed the node.
There were children with no parents, and I think they wrote the code.
My recursion never ended, nothing ever got to free().
My machines were going crazy, it was either them or me.
Power cycles were forbidden as the uptimes had to rise,
all the manuals were hidden far away from searching eyes.
Once again I chose a printer, but I really had no choice,
so I telephoned the helpline and they recognised my voice.
With the server not responding and the network up the creek
(someone changed the DNS box in the middle of last week)
I was reaching for the media for a spooler reinstall
when I saw a station crashing and it wouldn't boot at all.
But the boot disk wasn't altered, all the files were still in place.
I said this to the computer and it laughed right in my face.
In the end I got it started, but it only mounted root.
There were few commands to play with but it had begun to boot.
Forty minutes or so later, with my inodes mostly cleared,
I was rather short of data, over half had disappeared.
But at least I had my backups, surely they were home and dry,
write-protected, cycled, labelled - so my confidence was high.
I'd forgotten that the tape drive was in a disgusting mess.
All my diagrams were PostScript and I hadn't DPS.
There's an answer to these crises TFM does not relate:
Go and hide inside the libraries of a distant friendly state.