Oh, bother!
Of the last five times pell has mysteriously crashed (after ~200 day uptimes, too,) four of those times have been AFTER working hours, and usually after the bus schedules have gone to the nightly long-interval night schedules.
Like tonight. Ugh. So it's time to march down to the colo facility and give the stupid computer the three-finger kiss of life, and maybe it will come back and give me a system again.
Update: Well, that didn't go too well. It's never a good sign when, in the middle of doing a disk copy, I end up deleting the /home partition.
At least I've got nightly backups. Too bad they're on the other end of a 256k DSL line.