Rory Campbell-Lange wrote:
<snip>- a RAID card problem, possibly heat related- an out-of-control daemon apcupsd? samba? netatalk? - a kernel problem wrong kernel architecture, buggy kernel implementation by 3Ware - cracker or newbie sysadmin killing /boot and /var
What file system are you using for /boot and /var themselves?
Resuscitation ------------- I was able to fairly quickly get a working apt together and decided to reinstall all the critical packages so that /var would be populatedproperly.I encountered a major snag. All the amd64 repositories were offline or only had partial contents. In the end I wasn't able to rebuild the server this way (or install a new kernel) due to missing testing repositories.
Testing isn't missing. Debian has AMD64 testing, on any standard Debian mirror. What's missing is the obsolete unofficial Debian-AMD64 Project's clone of Testing. Use a real Debian mirror if Testing is what you want. See http://wiki.debian.org/DebianAMD64MirrorMove