the adventures of keyboardcat

[rhowaldt]

since recently my cat has decided my laptop's keyboard is a good place to hang. she has thus succeeded in doing the following things:
- focus the browser and make Google error out on a search query that was too damn long. the query, perhaps unsurprisingly but definitely ominous, consisted of nothing but 66666666666666 ad infinitum.
- stopping the playing song in MOC, then playing Aerosmith's 'Crazy' instead.*
- getting my keyboard all hairy.

this morning i walked into the room and wondered why the hell my laptop sounded like a vacuum cleaner, only to discover she was chilling on the keyboard again. the terminal was filled with weird characters, and i had to close it down to be able to continue doing anything. then my browser crashed, and my system refused to reboot. i pulled the plug, reinserted it, and booted up. i still haven't set up the getty-thingy to auto-start X, so as always i did this manually. however, X refused to start up, citing a lack of diskspace. so i did a 'df' and got this:

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[10:52:11]$ df
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs           29G   29G   0G  100% /
udev             10M     0   10M   0% /dev
tmpfs           402M  568K  402M   1% /run
/dev/sda5        29G   29G   0G  100% /
tmpfs          1005M     0 1005M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs          1005M     0 1005M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           100M     0  100M   0% /run/user
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/sda4        99G   82G   13G  87% /media/storage

root, aka sda5, filled to the fucking brim.
i then did a 'du -h / | grep '[0-9]G' to see which directory was so dogdamned huge it stopped me from doing anything. i bet some of you already guessed: /var/log
turns out the cat just produced 5,1G worth of error messages, which get logged in the /var/log/messages, /var/log/kernel.log and /var/log/syslog, producing a total of 16G of logfiles.

i deleted the files and rebooted, and everything is back to normal now. the cat is staring at me from a safe distance with a look of faked guilt and obvious sadism in her bright green eyes. fuck you, keyboardcat.

* incidentally, i was having sex with my GF when this happened, and since that moment 'Crazy' has become a favorite. so i suppose i have keyboardcat to thank for that one.

[slartie]

That post just made my fucking day, rho! I've always known cats were evil.

What she was really doing, was to test out her master plan, but there was only one small problem. She was too lazy to get rid of the evidence and decided .. "ahhh ..warm .. I can .. delete evidence ...zzz .. la ....ter...zzzzzzz"

[wuxmedia]

hehe sounds familiar, apart from the aerosmith 8)
our cats -
turn on the printer, which is why all the ink dries out.
sit on the CRT monitor (toasty) watching my wife facebookin on the computer, the other one tries to walk on the keyboard.
the laptop seems to be off limits...happily

[dkeg]

I love cats. You know what they say, that out of all domesticated animals, its cats that would not be affected if all of a sudden all human life ceased to exist. they would just go on their merry way, whereas dogs for example, would basically be lost, that their instinctual survival skills are diminished.

[rhowaldt]

@slartie: thanks man, glad you liked it! it seems indeed that the only reason cats have not yet taken over the world is because they are lazy asses :D
@dkeg: you just made a valid point :) i love the cat, don't get me wrong. i sometimes hate her too, like when i have to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to get my laptop in proper working order again :D

edit: @wux: i can recommend that Aerosmith for some good times ;)

[machinebacon]

WTF Rhosemary and CAT?!

But yeah, fuck /var/log :) And for even lazier asses, use ncdu / as root :)

[slartie]

I really need a cat. The most evil one I can find. I'll give it its own laptop and tell it to go forth and conquer.

[dkeg]

Cats are good at that kind of stuff

[ivanovnegro]

Great story Rho! /Me loves cats, had one.

[bones]

Cats are most definitely evil, but thankfully, mine has the good sense/decency to stay off the hardware. One day I caught ours, a very low maintenance 15 year old female, eyeballing my suspended (and warmish) T61 on the small kitchen table. "Don't even think of it," says I, and surprisingly she didn't.

Now, the really funny thing about this is, I came across this thread as an Aerosmith two-fer came on the radio (but not "Crazy").