Staggering back to life
At lunchtime, I went down to the colo where Pell lives to see if there was anything left to recover. I walked into the machine room there, only to see pell sitting there looking just like normal, with no smoke, no flames, no, well, nothing that would seem to indicate that it was out for lunch. And, oddly enough, syslog was still running and it said that pell actually had stopped working at 17:25, after which nothing happened except for the increasingly frantic complaints of the surviving daemons (innd and ntpd ran out of resources and abended pretty quickly, but postoffice kept announcing "421 WE'D LOVE TO TALK TO YOU BUT OUR DISK IS ON FIRE" up until the moment where I walked into the machine room and powered off the system.)
Even though I couldn't see anything broken with the system, I decided that it would be worth my while to pull the motherboard and power supply and replace them with the dumpster special motherboard from scene 15. I fitted them in, wired everything up, and when I powered everything back up everything turned itself without any fuss, muss, or bother. Ok. Not having to replace the system disk (at least not during lunchtime) is good.
When I looked at the offending K7 motherboard later, I smelled the tell-tale smell of scorched insulating varnish, and noticed that the processor fan rotated with loud SCRAPE noises, so I suspect that the culprit is the fan died enough so that the processor overheated and managed to fatally fumble a disk request, at which point pell became nothing more than a vociferous boatanchor.
I wonder how long the C2600 will last before it, too, becomes a vociferous boatanchor?