The hard drive of BOINC zombie #4 seems shot. It’s making weird ticking noises, and when I rebooted, (after unplugging it) the filesystem was so shot it couldn’t recover from the damage to the point there was no hostname – it showed up as (none) – and I couldn’t even log in. I couldn’t even reboot with ctrl-alt-del! I was figuring I’d reinstall Debian, but given how awful the hard drive sounds I figured it wouldn’t even be worth the effort. Then I realized that since it seemed all the other bits and pieces of the machine seemed to be in working order, I could run it as a live system of a CD! As luck would have it, Debian has official live CDs. So now I think I’ll wipe the drive, add it to the pile of drives to be recycled, and start running zombie #4 off a live system. It might not be as snappy, but the entire CD image is only 106MB!