cookies and mac & cheese were on sale; made out like a bandit.
i got almost all of /home, /etc, and /var off of my dying disk, despite desperate attempts by the disk to keep this from happening. soon it will all be on lustre, and i will be able to sleep easy at night.
well, soon.
turns out the firewire drivers are not very robust in low memory situations. unfortunately, the vm wants nothing more than to be out of memory. i haven't found anything the it likes doing more than not freeing clean pages. so, any machine i use is always out of memory, and that leads to I/O errors and lustre timeouts.
fortunately i have friends that fix this sort of thing for a living.