Recovery's Stupid Tale
                                       or A Stupid Tale of Recovery

I wanted to have a very different article ready today.  It started with a simple desire, to download
something which a corporation has made artificially hard to download and which therefore required me
to use a special downloading tool.  As of writing, I lack a normal computer and had to use my rented
server to the purpose.  My copy of the special downloading tool was out of date, and so I harmlessly
tried to update it.  I was shown several errors before that update failed, logged out to log back in
as my usual user, and found myself to be locked out.  I'd successfully and unintentionally broken my
secure shell daemon, with little recourse.  Still, since a GNU/Linux system is a disharmonious chunk
of many different parts, the rest of the system continued to work, but I could no longer control it.

I knew from experience that my chosen business accounted for this case by providing direct access to
the system from a ``dashboard'' interface.  I had to use the Apple iPad with this interface, to some
difficulty: the interface wasn't recognized as a text field, and I couldn't get the virtual keyboard
to appear.  I received the Apple iPad alongside a bluetooth keyboard I'd never used, which I learned
to charge and use; I learned the WWW browser still interpreted the space key as a scrolling command,
and had to figure out how to use the ``shell'' without it; I realized soon enough how tab completion
inserts a space after an unambiguous completion, and could use the kill and yank commands solely for
entering a space.  I bother not with encryption in e-mail and the like, and e-mails were the primary
data in jeopardy, so I found it easy enough to hand them over to the WWW server and download them in
that way, getting the cryptographic hash checksum digests on both sides to verify my file were true.

The obvious solution was to destroy this server and build anew.  After I cleaned out the filesystem,
and a staff member made an archive thereof to save me the trouble, I used another such rented server
which sees little use to backup this archive.  I soon took a break, left it for tomorrow, and slept.

I tried to backup that archive of the filesystem before wiping anything, to no avail.  I'm unable to
download gigabytes of data from home without waiting several days, meaning I must go into town to do
so; I'd already tried to download the archive the previous night, without success.  Unlike the reams
of e-mails, I decided this archive was more confidential, if only because the urgency was no longer,
and foolishly tried to use secure shell file copying for this at my local public library.  I brought
the Apple iPad, my trusty Lemote YeeLoong, and an IBM ThinkPad running OpenBSD.  The ThinkPad is one
of my newer machines, and failed during the attempted download of the archive, giving me a worthless
``kernel debugger'' session and wasting several hours.  It later failed the same way, a second time.

I'd by this point already decided to wipe my server clean and begin the restoration, without certain
backups.  I'd been wondering how to isolate the nonsense mentioned in a recent article for making an
archive of some e-mails with another provider, from the greater system, but clearing the system once
done would certainly do it; so, my first wipe was used solely to run that horrible little program so
that the archive could also be sent to that other rented server, and it was thereafter cleared for a
second time to make way for the restoration.  I'd produced a cryptographic hash checksum digest that
I trusted, but had been wary of putting my flash disk in the IBM ThinkPad running OpenBSD to back it
up, fearing this would cause it to ``crash''.  I should've known the piece of shit software would do
so regardless; in any case, I'll need to make a second archive of those e-mails just for certainty's
sake, but I can use the other rented server for that later, and really should've done it by now too.

Once I had a working system and an archive of what had been working, I could pick and choose from my
few configuration files to restore.  That e-mail server I use changed its configuration file format,
within the last five years, and it was no fun getting that to work; I'd been unable to find that old
configuration file at all, at first, but it was worthless even after I'd found it.  The secure shell
daemon was easy enough to configure as I'd had it.  My website and Gopher hole are static, meaning a
simple file dump sufficed, and everything else was easy enough to reconfigure too, but still no fun.

It's a funny thought, but I believe a ``server operating system'' shouldn't be so easy to destroy by
sheer accident; the haphazard parts upgrading independently is an obvious disaster, and stupid tales
of recovery aren't hard to find if one goes looking for them.  It's long occurred to me how, while I
rent a very cheap server, I rent not the absolute cheapest; I'd perhaps be better off with more, for
different tasks, arranged in a way allowing me to destroy and restore them if needed.  I should also
switch away from shitty server implementations like OpenSMTPd, and use those less likely to waste my
time, which I believe Qmail will be.  This is an utterly miserable way to spend a day and some time.

Since those idiots writing all of this software haven't yet done it well, they certainly never will.
.