Crazy day. Emergencies right and left. First, wacky DNS misbehavior upstream confused the email system of one of our clients; next, our primary DNS server coughed and died. Its disk was somehow full.

We deleted some old cruft to free up space, but watching df every few seconds showed it losing the space ridiculously quickly. Seasoned system administrator that I thought I was, I figured some logfile was going nuts — probably the named log, because of the upstream wackiness. So, from the top of the root filesystem, I ran du -sk * every minute or so. Strangeness of strangenesses — there was no significant change to any directory, but the disk was madly filling up! The only filesystem that was growing noticeably was /proc, which takes no space on the disk. Running out of ideas, I unmounted proc. Still no dice. Disk usage was up to 97%, and still growing. No ideas. We were in NT territory: strange, inexplicable misbehavior, and no way to fix it. So we did the NT thing and rebooted. The system came up fine, with disk usage at 65% and steady.

What did I learn? Never assume that the solution to a problem has to make sense. Even on Unix, random things happen. Of course, they happen far less often on OpenBSD.

Played Ultimate frisbee at summer league. We played shoddily and were handed our first loss of the season. Frank's family is in town, and they started their visit by watching him play, after which we went to dinner at Friday's. I have tasted no better jalapeño poppers than those served at Friday's. Yes, folks, this includes the Euc.

When Frank and I got home, we discussed the CWRU Ultimate team's upcoming season. We lost a couple good old guys, but we have some new talent in the wings too. A new name is in the works; “SCWRUheads” is just dumb. We're thinking about “Crimson Lips” because it sounds cool and it's in everybody's favorite song, “Cleveland Rocks.” What do you think?

Then I installed a Java telnet applet on home.ooi.net so users can access the Unix shell from their Web browsers. In fact, I am writing these words in vi in Netscape on my Mac. Nifty.