Something has happened at work that has caused me a certain amount of anxiety. In response to that, I decided I really needed a pet project. I still don’t know what that project was going to be, but there were a few technologies that I thought I’d like to know better / play with. Specifically, Twisted, Stackless and RabbitMQ.
I got on to the ubuntu box that I host in the amazon cloud and started doing updates so that I had a current box to do some of the above installs on. Only the updates started failing and in some really odd places like update-rc.d. It was chewing up big CPU and a strace on it showed … well, nothing. I eventually figured out that I had a full disk, but even nuking a whole bunch of files in /tmp (some spew from gallery it looked like) didn’t help.
So, I spent most of this weekend setting up a new ec2 instance and porting stuff over. I think we’re mostly back and running — after all, I’m writing this and you’re reading it. But still, a weekend of cleanup from some hasty updating. Yuck. Something good did come of it though, I attached an EBS volume to my EC2 instance which should make for some easier backing up, and better data reliability.