[plug] A story

[Brad Campbell]

Are you sitting comfortably?
Right then, let's begin shall we?

This is a story about a young pillock called Brad and his wonderful journey of discovery with his 
laptop.

Brad was a clever chappie, like a boy scout he was always prepared. When he set up his shiny new 
laptop he though to himself "Gee, I have all this hard disk space. I bet one day I'll fill it up 
with lots of wonderful data. Wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to that data. I'd better 
set up a strict backup regime!". And so he did!

Brad went to his good friend Google and asked about linux, networks and backups. After his eyes had 
unglazed he decided upon a nice combination of a kludgy bash script, some network tools and rsync to 
do incremental backups to his office linux server.
When properly configured and well tested (for Brad was never one to trust blindly) he found it to be 
a most satisfactory backup solution. With his new found confidence in his data safety, Brad happily 
went about his life for quite a while, knowing that his data was well journaled, safe (for it was 
backed up on a RAID-1 array) and quite secure. This gave Brad a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside.

All was well until one morning about a day ago when Brad received an anxious phone call from the 
office to tell him that nasty things had been happening and something about a "disk full" error 
message when anyone tried to save data to the server.

Brad, fingers nimbly flying across the keyboard, quickly logged into the server and assessed the 
situation. Noting that all was indeed not well and the server was indeed full, he performed a quick 
appraisal to determine that his rotating backup was consuming quite a bit of disk space.
As Brad was late for a meeting, he thought "Gee, my wonderful laptop has been a great little 
performer, and so reliable too. I guess I can go without this backup data until I get back to the 
office and can perform another backup. I'm in such a hurry I just don't have time to be selective 
about this", he deftly issued the complex command "rm /backup/brad -rf" and was off to his meeting.

Upon returning to the office all was well. The staff were happy for they were able to save data to 
the server once again, and Brad was happy in the knowledge he had returned harmony to the office.

Brad poured himself a well deserved coffee and began to resume his laptop, knowing he must run the 
backup procedure to return full piece of mind.

When Brad opened his E-mail (which he always does first thing as there are usually witty anecdotes 
by members of a well known Perth Linux users group) he noticed a wonderful picture his cousin had 
E-mailed him from her easy to use AOL account. Seeing this picture brightened Brad's day 
considerably and he decided to share the glee around. He quickly undocked his laptop and walked over 
to show the wonderful picture to his mother. Little did he know that as he walked, a nasty, smelly, 
putrid bit of grit had worked its way in between the pure shiny gold fingers than connected his hard 
disk to it's motherboard. In a quick stroke of not so good luck, at the same time the system was 
attempting to write some filesystem metadata and noticed that things indeed were not well. 
Attempting to work around this minor irritation, the system very cleverly dropped back from the 
zippy DMA mode to the slightly not so zippy PIO mode. Unfortunately as we all know, in PIO mode 
there is no error checking and the system will quite happily write out all it's unclean buffers not 
knowing that the data it's sending to the disk is less than it perhaps should be.

Brads laptop slowed to a crawl and when he re-docked he he thought to himself "Oh my, what can be 
wrong? The system has slowed down to Windows XP pace! This does not bode well." Brad poured himself 
another cup of coffee while he waited for his system to return to its usual smiling self. It did not.
In a fit of desperation Brad performed an "Emergency Sync" which involves pressing several keys 
together while holding one finger up the left nostril and flicking the lid switch with the left big 
toe. He then used another magic key combination to quickly shut the machine down.

When he flicked the power switch again, all seemed well until GRUB threw an "Error 17". "Oh No!" 
Brad thought. He popped in his trusty Knoppix disk and it did indeed confirm his suspicions that not 
at all good things had been happening to his data. He ran a magic incantation of "e2fsck" and it 
promised him a world of heartache and pain. Having no choice, for he needed his machine like an 
Alcoholic needs his next beer, he solemnly gave permission for all bad things to be righted.

When he "mounted" the filesystem a while later he was initially relieved to find everything where it 
was supposed to be (or so he thought). Uttering a few choice praises he proceeded to type the magic 
"cd /home/brad" to be greeted with a nasty "bash: cd: /home/brad: No such file or directory".
All was not well in Lego Land! "Oh No!" he cried. How ever shall I check my E-mail now?

Upon further inspection he noted that all his files were safely backed up in a little directory with 
the wonderful name "lost+found" and had all been helpfully renamed in nice "random" numbers.
"Whew!" he thought. "At least my precious files are safe".

36 Hours later, 3.4GiB of his Precious 3.6GiB have been cleverly renamed and put back where they 
belong and he can again access his precious E-mail.

That, my children, is why Murphy, His wife and all his children are complete and utter bastards!


Goodnight!