The Ballad Of badtz-maru

by Jens Alfke ⟿ January 10, 2006

I had a tiny Linux box
Its name was badtz-maru ;
It sat out in the office
Serving tunes for me and you.

One day the Squeezebox just went black!
I didn’t know what to do!
Safari, ssh and ping
Lost touch with badtz-maru.
The living room was silent
(Between games of Pikachu).

Last weekend I rolled up my sleeves
And grafted on a head
So I could hack at badtz-maru
And raise it from the dead.

The boot parade scrolled by, but then
With sinking heart I read
Of errors in filesystems,
Evil things best left unsaid.

I grabbed my dusty Linux book
And then without delay,
Lips moving with the effort,
Typed in ‘fsck’.

The battle raged! The disk fought back,
Its platters growing hot,
But I showed who was master
(by pressing “Y” a lot.)

One-two! One-two! And through and through
The vorpal tool went hack!
The damage was deleted
From each inode and track.

I raised a cheer, detached its head,
And went galumphing back
To the comfort of the living room,
And there cued up a track.

I have a tiny Linux box
Its name is badtz-maru
It sits out in the office
Serving tunes for me and you.

Addendum: Some months after this was written, I grew tired of badtz-maru’s noisy case fan and took the vorpal blade to it, dissecting out the hard disk and plopping it into a jar of formaldehyde USB drive enclosure, which I then plugged into “pancake”, our Mac Mini. However, the disk is still named “badtz-maru”.