[Geek Alert!]

I just have to figure that Mowgli, my main workstation, hates me leaving it alone for very long.  Every time I come back home from an extended trip it has to give me several hours of balk before it starts running again.  I have no idea why, but it seems to be a combination of hardware and software issues that just scream in my face every time I come back home.

Mowgli has a strange keyboard issue, which may have something to do with the fact that I prefer typing on an IBM "M" series keyboard and that might be a tad old for the newer motherboards.  I like the old IBMs so much I keep several spares here at Casa del Garrett, and use one at work too.  The only theoretical drawback is there is no special ‘Windows’ key…but some of us don’t consider having hardware that doesn’t do Windows Only things a drawback.  The problem I’m having is that occasionally the keyboard and motherboard get into a state that prevents Mowgli from starting up.  I hit the power switch and nothing happens.  So I have to unplug the keyboard, hit the front panel power switch, and when Mowgli turns on immediately turn off the power at the power supply, then turn the power supply switch back on and plug the keyboard back in, then hit the front panel power switch again.  Then Mowgli will start.  Note that if I plug the keyboard back in Before I turn the power supply switch back on Mowgli still won’t start back up.  It all has to happen in just that particular sequence.  I have no idea why this happens, but I suspect there is a strange bios thing going on between the new motherboard and the old IBM keyboard.

This time, when I went to Portland, I decided to just unplug the keyboard before I left.  Fine.  So I got back home and plugged in the keyboard and started Mowgli.  Mowgli started up without a htich.  Feeling satisfied with myself, I sat and watched it boot.  Mowgli is currently running CentOS and when the GRUB boot loader came up it told me there were no kernels installed.  What!??? 

You always have to give me shit when I come back home, don’t you?  I have no idea what happened, other then I’d run Yum to update the system before I left for Portland and it all seemed to go fine, except I didn’t reboot to test the new kernel, I just shut down.  I’ve done that before and it never bit me until now.  Growl.  So there’s GRUB cheerfully offering to boot "other", which was the only choice available, because it thought I didn’t have any Linux kernels installed. I entered the GRUB command line instead, to see if I could fix it from there. 

I pointed root to the system drive and tried to read the GRUB config file and the menu files.  GRUB kept insisting the files didn’t exist.  Since I’d never used the GRUB command line before I wasn’t even sure I was using it correctly.  I tried manually booting the kernel but since there is no way to get a directory listing from the GRUB command line I had no idea what it was named.  Linux Kernels are named something like "vmlinuz-2-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5", with the version numbers obviously part of the filename.  That’s not exactly easy to remember.

So I gave up on GRUB and re-booted with the CentOS install CD loaded.  When the installer came up I entered "linux rescue" at the prompt.  The rescue routine will try to find your installed kernels and mount one in /mnt/sysimage.  It searched my hard drive and found the kernel I had there, mounted it, and gave me a prompt.   I’d never had to use this before so it took me a little while to figure out I had to chroot to the newly mounted system drive before I could use it.  Once I figured that out, I was able to  go to the /boot directory on my system drive and try to figure out what had happened.

The kernel was there, but when I went into the grub directory, the menu.lst file didn’t have it listed.  There was only the entry for "other".  So I had to manually re-add the entry for the kernel I had (which I could now see the name of).   Fortunately I had a previous menu.lst file printed out and I was able to use that as a template for adding the entry for my kernel.  Once I did that, I rebooted again and then everything came up normally.

Welcome home Bruce.  Damn.  Even cats don’t give you the attitude some computers do…