avestriel crashed again on Sunday and Monday nights — both times around 2:00 in the morning. Strange. It’s been fine since, having made it through Tuesday and Wednesday nights uneventfully. Stranger.

I left the office window wide open on the crash nights, and it got pretty cold in there. It seems unlikely that that could be the cause, but stranger things have happened. (I also had a chance to open up a power supply that’s the twin of avestriel’s yesterday, and was properly horrified at the sight of the great big amoebic blobs of solder that lurked beneath the cover plates. I’d like to believe that something that ugly is the cause of my problems. Of course, if it is, I have to ask the attendant question: is it worth spending any additional money buying replacement parts for machine that’s that old?)

No, I still haven’t backed it up, and I still haven’t brought its replacement up. Too much other stuff to do.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon walking my new brother-in-law through the diagnosis and repair of the damage done to his computer by a freak moving accident that occurred yesterday. Somehow, relocating the thing between outlets killed its power supply. Don’t ask me to explain how that’s supposed to work, but at least the power supply, an Enermax, did its job by dying without taking any of the more delicate components with it.

The recovery process involved recommending a good power-supply tester, and a good power supply. (He decided to get both at once, figuring that if the problem was his old power supply, he’d save himself a second trip, while if it wasn’t, he could always return the new power supply later.)

Fortunately, it was, the new Antec NeoPower 480 he bought seems to fit the bill perfectly, his machine is once more chugging along, and my sister doesn’t have to cede back the box he handed down to her so that he can play World of WarCraft.

I think this makes the third weekend in a row that I’ve been on the phone doing technical support for members of my extended family. On the one hand, it’s satisfying to help folks get their stuff working again; on the other, I can’t help but feel the occasional temptation to fake a learning disability.

(Then again, it marks one of my few positive accomplishments this weekend, so perhaps I shouldn’t knock it.)

When the final trumpet sounds, and the Linux kernel is called to account, the ledger eternal will bear witness to its numerous crimes and misdeeds — yeah, autofs, I’m looking at you — but udev, the 2.6 device-management infrastructure, will emphatically not be among these. No, it will go in the other column, the one that makes the case for redemption and eternal life.

udev is device management done right, elegantly and with just the right degree of abstraction: it handles USB dongles and PCI cards with equal aplomb, yet its configuration syntax is not so abstruse as to defy mortal aspirations. Quite the contrary, in fact. I was able to go from square one to a working configuration in about half an hour, with a little help.

Using udev, my USB devices can finally have predictable names, regardless of the order in which I plug them in. This in turn means that my fstab entries regarding removable devices and their respective filesystems can finally be something more than a laughable exercise in starry-eyed optimism.

Perhaps I will butt up against, and curse, udev’s limitations in short order, but for the time being, it’s a pure delight to use.