Flashes of Panic

My first car—the one I learned to drive on, the first one registered in my name—needed extensive work before I took it to college. Since I couldn’t afford the work, I did it myself. This involved the replacement of all four doors, which were rusted, among other things. I borrowed a truck (one of the advantages of my usual summer job was the availability of flatbed trucks,) and drove a hard bargain with a scrap-yard owner in Chelsea, Maine to get four rust-free doors from two different wrecks in his yard. I drove them home, stripped most of the interior finish out of all eight doors and the car, then put it back together, complete with at least one working door lock. For at least two more years, I drove a tri-colored car: the original body was silver (though it developed large mangy primer-colored patches in its last days,) the front doors grey, and the back doors maroon. One of the back doors did not open; the other would open only if the corresponding front door was also open.

I mention this because, in the process of this reconstruction, I acquired an absurd volume of machine tools. The problem was that the car was a sort of early hybrid, an American make with a Japanese diesel engine. Half of the fasteners were metric, half inches, and the other half required Torx bits. I built a remarkably heterogenous toolbox.

I’ve done the same with my servers here. Some of the servers are (relatively) modern Linux flavors, running the 2.4 kernel with modern niceties like sudo, iptables, and various database utilities. But one of them is a bastard child like my first car. It has a 2.2 kernel and a lot of obsolete packages hooked closely in to its function. In order to run modern software, like SpamAssassin or Logwatch, I needed to install a second, newer version of Perl (think metric, not imperial, socket wrenches.) Now I’m getting database errors; I may need to upgrade the database as well, in order to get the most recent version of SpamAssassin installed.

And it does feel just like working on that car, or the Scopmobile chronicle. I try a few different tools, maybe find a new one, and in the end I wind up hammering on a piece with the socket handle trying to make it fit in place. One day, the current software just won’t work, and it will be time to power down the little old box and find a place to properly dispose of the remains.

I’m comforted by the idea that I won’t be here to see that day.

Now Playing: Daisy And Prudence from Distillation by Erin McKeown