For reasons I still don’t fully understand, the server locked up hard. Compounding things, it wouldn’t boot.

LayeredTech generously gave me a couple free hours on their spiffy KVM-over-IP system and burned me a LiveCD allowing me to go in and fix the problem… An fsck of everything didn’t turn up anything too big, but I ended up re-installing grub, and all was well. (I did take advantage of the time to run some nice thorough filesystem scans while the filesystems were unmounted, but everything was in order.)

Now I just have to come back up from my score of -99 in the pool!