no not my brain (for once)- I managed to break the tray on my Plextor CD-ROM drive, and then tried to "fix" it by pushing it back in... this has resulted in the drive being converted into an expensive pile of junk :(

So I'll have to grab the one out of arise (means switching arise off, *sigh*) and use that. Arise doesn't really need the cdrom in addition to the cdrw anyway, since I don't seem to by doing any direct cd->cd copying.

otoh, maybe I should invest in a faster cdrw... hmm...

Anyway, on top of all that, while I was on IRC, all my processes began freezing one by one. I killed X, but the entire machine was still frozen. So I bounced the machine (techspeak for rebooted) and it hang on trying to mount the NFS filesystems after a rather ominous:

Sep 28 01:54:39 monolith kernel: 00:10.0: 3Com PCI 3c905B Cyclone 10/100/BNC at 0xe000. Vers LK1.1.16
Sep 28 01:54:39 monolith kernel:  ***INVALID CHECKSUM 003d*** <6>SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00

ick. So I swapped out that NIC and put in an older one. No checksum error, but it STILL wouldn't mount NFS. So I ssh'd to arise from kilinrax's machine, and tried various things (dropping monolith's old ARP entry, checking I could ping monolith (yes) and query its portmapper, running tcpdump on arise and looking to see what monolith was doing)... eventually I bounced the NFS server on arise (still using the user space nfsd atm) and everything was fine again. Dammit. I feel like an NT admin, almost. All dirty.

So I currently have just 10Mbps connectivity until I get a new NIC. Actually that NIC that produces the checksum error might still be OK, but that kind of error worries me... I shall replace it anyway, esp. since I don't need a NIC with a BNC plug on it anymore ffs.

Hrm, Plextor cd writers cost 150 quid and i don't need on. Must... resist...