[llamabeast]

Okay all, the system is even downer. I turned the computer off and on again, and it wouldn't restart. So maybe the bizarre behaviour (I couldn't work out what was going on) was a result of a hardware fault or something. Hard to say.

I can't work out how to fix it (I suspect it's not fixable), but fortunately my housemate is something of a legend and is setting me up some virtual partition on his server. If that works we'll be sorted, and if not I'll run it off my lab computer for a while.

The conclusion is that it looks like the server might still be down for a day or few, but hopefully not much more than that. Thanks everyone for being so patient.