Monday, 06 September 2004

I had such a crap day today.

It started with a lousy night's sleep. Then I actually managed to extract myself from bed at 6am (for a change) and go to the gym. This left me in a totally shagged state for the rest of the day.

I got the results for the first assignment for COMP2400 back. I got 37 out of 60, after losing 10 marks because I put exit at the end of each SQL file. I'm rather pissed off about this, because the assignment specification didn't state how the assignment would be run for marking purposes. I did my testing by going sqlplus / @filename.sql and I wanted to be returned to a shell prompt after running the query. Of course, the bulk marking tried to run them all in batch, and mine exited after the first query, requiring the marker to edit all 10 files to comment out the exit, hence the mark deduction.

I'm also annoyed at myself because some of the queries weren't logically correct. I should have known better. I know SQL. I've been doing it for years. Granted, I don't usually join a table on itself 6 times to answer a question, but hey, I had higher expectations for my results.

Moving right along to Maths, the results were back (already) for the mid-semester. I wasn't expecting to do anything spectacular, but I also wasn't expecting to pass by 1 mark either. At least it was a pass I guess...

The one highlight of the day was the result for the Finance mid-semester: 21 out of 26, or 78%. Given I was contemplating not sitting the exam, I'm pleased with the outcome, and I'm pleased that I did.

So now I just have the COMP1110 mid-semester on Wednesday evening, and the COMP1110 assignment due on Friday as immediate concerns. I dare say the third COMP1110 assignment is going to be released before the break, and so that'll leave me with three assignments to work on over the mid-semester break. Oh joy, oh glee.

Just after midday AEST, daedalus.andrew.net.au started acting weird. My SSH connection was unceremoniously closed, and subsequent attempts to reconnect resulted in the TCP connection being opened, then immediately closed before any SSH protocol negotiation took place. Sendmail was still responding, but Apache seemed to have died. I had to ask for the guys at the colo facility to kick it in the guts.

Afterwards, I couldn't find anything in the logs. There's pretty much a gap from 12:14 to 13:39 when it was rebooted. My immediate thoughts, prior to inspecting the logs, were that either Mhonarc or MIMEDefang had eaten up all the memory for some reason, and the kernel had started killing things indiscriminately, but I'd expect to see some general carnage in the logs to indicate this. So now I'm going to check the AIDE output...

AIDE seems to think there hasn't been anything untoward (of course, I should really get a copy of the AIDE database off the box as soon as it's created each day...)

chkrootkit was also happy with things.

So I think I'll have to chalk it up as an undetermined crash. :-|
I don't like instability on a box a 1000 kilometres away.