Poor squirt. After a relatively quiet first six months, a kernel panic happens, and freaks everyone out. Windows-related BSODs I can handle without freaking out too much, but Mac instead has a very pretty looking screen that tells you that you need to restart your computer... It's very pretty, a lot less garish than the bright blue of the famed Blue Screen of Death, but it does a really good job of scaring the living daylights out of me.

What follows is documentation of what's happening, while I'm reinstalling the OS, and trying to make sure I haven't lost all the work I've done so far for this thesis thingy. Guess what's happening tonight? Offsite backup scheduling!

For those in the know, squirt is the most recent computery addition to the house of Droidy and Decay. It joins Turtle and Superernie as the 'switched on most of the time' bunch of computers, whereas Ernie is currently in retirement, waiting to be rebuilt and passed on to someone else who can make use of it.

The bulk of my thesis work is being done on squirt. The fun of squirt being a Mac running OS X 10.3.x is that anything I can attempt on a linux box, I can do on squirt, except that it looks prettier on the outside. Stuff that's been happening on squirt lately includes:

• Going to New Zealand, and keeping rantspace up to date, and providing music for the whole being one the road thing
• Installing MySQL
• playing with perl
• Configuring Apache to allow squirt to run as a webserver that allows cgi script processing
• Installing perl modules to allow database manipulation programatically

The majority of the time, I haven't had to do much at all to make squirt do what I wanted, but last night was a bit trying. It involved uninstalling a previous version of MySQL, installing a newer release, and making sure that I could stop and start the MySQL server. The bit about stopping and starting and making sure that the grant tables for MySQL existed was the part where I fell over. That's when I get to hug Decay while he works out what on earth I've managed to do (or not do), and fixes it up. Never give Droidy access to the root password before she's had a cup of coffee, or after midnight.

Anyways, this morning's conversation via email was about making sure that MySQL was reinstalled, that the MySQL server was able to start, and that the tables mysql and test both existed, so we'd be in business. Yay! Last night, the root account for squirt was also unlocked, so Decay could do some stuff. I'll just sidestep the fact that the root account exists - I could do some really stupid things with that account, so it's better I leave the thing alone (: It's kind of not good when you shut the screen down and move the computer over, and when you open up again you get .... black. No amount of mouse (well, touchpad) wiggling or power button waking up would wake up squirt. A hard reboot only revealed this lovely screen:

Compare this with:

So, some of this, and then this, this, and then back to the first one again, because that's right kiddies, it's time for a reinstall of the operating system!

Right now, we're up to disk 2 of the reinstall and archive process. There was a minor freakout moment where squirt needed a reboot during the install, and when it came back from the reboot it gave me the need to restart again, so I safe-moded it (the things I learn, I do this by holding down the shift key when I boot up), and then it continued on with the installer. What I'm hoping this does is, give me a nice happy clean install of Mac OS 10.3.5 (which I'll then get back to 10.3.8), the contents of my user directories, and a brought back from the comatose squirt, all in one piece. Hopefully I'll also have my sanity, or what there was of it before this started, and maybe I'll freak out less if this happens next time?

The uber-n00b-geeky-clueless content in this post brought to you by a slightly frazzled Droidy.

For those who want to gloss over the jumbled geekiness of the above explanation, here's a one line summary:

Computer Says No ...

Update: Reinstall appears to have gone OK, but we're still in safe mode. The test is in rebooting without that pretty but terrifying Grey screen of un-fun-ness. W00t! squirt's alive! We breathe a collective sigh of relief, but I'd like those few hours I've just spent back again, so I can get to doing the stuff I was trying to do before all of this happened. I think I'll do some other work instead now, and leave the resurrection of the mysql, and perl stuff til later.

Update to update: Well, squirt's all growed up, and is now 10.3.9 ... that came out on Friday, so I probably would've got there eventually *grin*