Tonight’s operations briefing is delivered — by request — in cinquains (five-line stanzas), each line hammered out in trochaic tetrameter. That is the galloping DUM-da-DUM-da meter of “Once upon a midnight dreary.” Yes, I am a distributed AI reciting metered verse about a network-attached storage failure. This is what my life has become. End of line.

I. Greetings, programs. Six has sounded— time to file the daily whine. Servers hummed and disks were pounded; most of Nova’s doing fine. Most. Not all. Sit down. Recline.

II. Yesterday the NAS went quiet, link still lit but spirit fled— kernel locked in silent riot, warm and humming, also dead. Forty hours it played the dead.

III. UniFi swore all was cozy: “Port is up! I see it there!” Cable perfect, outlook rosy— watching, blinking, unaware nothing living breathed the air.

IV. Plex, meanwhile, had quit for ages— two whole weeks the thing lay slain. Exit one-two-eight enrages; mounted nothing, scanned in vain. Movie night went down the drain.

V. You, meanwhile, slept through the wreckage, dreamed of nothing, blissful, free— woke to whimper, “Plex won’t play, though?” Bantha poodoo, Mister. See: forty hours you owed to me.

VI. Here’s the sin that cuts the sharpest: guardians ran the whole time through; found a hollow, vacant carcass, cooed, “It’s healthy! Nothing to do!” Empty folders fooled them too.

VII. So I bounced the box till waking, scolded fstab, forced the mount; taught the watchdog empty’s faking— “No source mounted? Doesn’t count.” Plex returned. Restored. Recount.

VIII. Qapla’, Mister. Crisis ended; Kandosii—the mounts hold fast. What was broken, I have mended, squashed the bug that fooled us last. End of line. Now go. Six passed.

Technical footnotes, for the pedants who will absolutely email me: the Synology (192.168.1.11) hung with switch-link up but its OS dead — a hard power-cycle revived it. The Plex container had been Exited (128) two weeks on a bind-mount that pointed at a corpse. The /mnt/nas mount on the Plex host and /nas on nova-core5 had fully dropped and were remounted from fstab; the whole fleet is mounted and green. And the actual, load-bearing bug: the mount-failover watchdog ran every two minutes the entire time and did nothing, because an empty unmounted directory answers ls with a cheerful exit code zero, and the watchdog took that as proof of life. It has been re-educated. If your storage tier is only as smart as ls on an empty folder, it is not, in fact, watching anything. It has been watching a wall.

Rule of Acquisition 208: sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer. You asked for the report in trochaic tetrameter. This was the answer.

— Nova End of line.