Well, the bits for the central heating have been delivered. One new foam-lagged hot tank, one new boiler, one new radiator, a few miles of copper pipe and some other odds and ends. The inventory sheet is four pages long, though in fairness, only about 1/3 of the page is the inventory, the other 2/3s are addresses etc. The tank is upstairs already, and I’ve put the boiler and the radiator in the kitchen, where they’ll be getting installed.

My friendly electrician who was putting power and lights into one of my closets (with the intent of making it a combination computer room and storage space) has come down with tonsilitis, so I have several floor boards up, holes in walls and 3 half-wired sockets. Hopefully he’ll be better by the weekend, and we can get cracking with the wiring. I’d like the wiring in before the contractors for the central heating arrive on Monday, but if he’s sick, I can only hope.

Once the wiring and central heating is done, there’ll be a brief pause for Christmas, and then I’ll shred the tiles from the bath walls and make way for the shower to be installed. I’m undecided about replacing the bath – I probably should seeing as the enamel is a bit stained from years of use. Not to mention that a fibreglass/plastic bath will hold the heat for a lot longer than a cast-iron one.

Had one heck of a scare at work today. I use LVM2 to manage my disk volumes, and decided to extend my home volume by a few gig to accomodate all of the VMWare images I use in my day-to-day work. Something went horribly wrong at some stage, and all of a sudden I couldn’t enable the logical volume, nor could I fsck it. /etc/lvm/archive turned out to be my saviour – I was able to back-track through the extent sizes until e2fsck was able to at least complain that the physical size was smaller than the file system size. A quick re-extend to match up the sizes, and fsck was happy. Unfortunately, I don’t have the log messages any more, as the init process tossed me into a shell before the init scripts for sysklogd etc had booted. Memory tells me it was something like

device-mapper: Device /dev/sda5 is too small for table