The Wired article concludes…

From his seat at the defense table, Reiser seemed to offer supporting evidence for that so-called “geek defense” in the form of his own actions, frequently quarreling with his attorney, and interrupting DuBois’ cross-examination. In January, Judge Goodman threatened to bar Reiser from his own trial. “I’m not sure whether you’re doing this on purpose to screw up the process or it’s just part of your nature,” the judge said outside the presence of the jury. “I’m tired of you disrupting the courtroom.”

DuBois made little effort to hide his frustration with his client. The biggest bone of contention was Reiser’s insistence on taking the stand himself — a move that may have been Reiser’s undoing.

On many of Reiser’s 11 days on the stand, jurors were seen shaking their heads in disbelief, laughing to themselves and wearing skeptical looks.

Ok, I’m not one to hold a grudge but quoting myself from six years ago:

Welp, reiserfs has officially decieved me.

 Kernel Panic: Unable to mount root filesystem on 03:07

reiserfsck —rebuild-tree /dev/hda7
[UNCORRECTABLE ERROR] SECTOR 110!
[UNCORRECTABLE ERROR] SECTOR 111!
[UNCORRECTABLE ERROR] SECTOR 112!
[UNCORRECTABLE ERROR] SECTOR 113!
[UNCORRECTABLE ERROR] SECTOR 114!   `

It then makes it to about 133 before aborting and dying. Good times indeed.

For those not in the know, that means, I just lost my / linux partition with all of my data on it. Suck suck suck.

Edit: No seriously—this fucking sucks. hard. =/

Six Months Later

advice: Do not use reiserfs.

ben: told you cough

During incident handling, time is precious. I try to make myself take notes and communicate about the incident over logged channels like e-mail and IM - to the point that I think some team members have rules specifically for e-mail from me.

The detailed timelines that can be reconstructed from these notes are crucial when preparing post-mortem documents!

I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches Script the process wherever possible.

— Alice Roosevelt Longworth (and Grant Stavely)

Initially, I thought bash history could help.

# Bash settings
export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%s "
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export HISTFILESIZE="9999999"

But what about the command output? There is a better way:

Firstly, and this is something that took getting used to, set up a fancy shell prompt to provide the log with context and time stamping:

--(grant@sensor)-(1/pts/1)-(17:32:33-UTC/28-Apr-08)--
--($:/nsm/)-

Gross! A two-line shell prompt! Trust me, it’s useful.

Then just add to your shell start-up:

# start script to log everything now!
exec /usr/bin/script -f /nsm/var/handlerlog/$USER.shell_log.` date +'%Y-%m-%d:%H:%M:%S' `.$$

Script will then log everything that prints to the console with the prompt providing context.