Half the problem recently was an extended blackout (normally power here is very reliable, usually if it goes out it comes back on within a few seconds) that caused the UPS battery to drain rather quickly (running the G3 webserver and an old P200 router machine) before I could get my car hooked up, so the server went down hard. That wouldn't be too big of a deal except that it had been running for well over a year and I had forgotten what the procedure was to boot it! Now... normally a Mac just boots into Mac OS by searching the drives and devices for something bootable, but you can set them to boot into Open Firmware where you have to issue a command that tells it what to boot from (handy for Linux since you can specify the file you want to boot) but since it had been soooo long (and rare before the last time I booted it) since I've issued a boot command to this machine I had to start looking stuff up...
My efforts to boot the machine were futile, it started to boot once, then part way through booting it rebooted and then the same boot command would just return an error (as if it crashed the instant it tried to load) so I thought the hard drive may have finally kicked the bucket. I removed it and put it in another mac that was still running Mac OS X, but it refused to mount the ext2 filesystem even though the driver is supposed to be able to... So... I downloaded Gentoo, but it wouldn't boot, so I then downloaded Ubuntu live CD (Debian) and it booted (finally!) so then I was able to mount the server's HD and copy everything of value over to my main machine... This morning that was complete.
Shoved the HD back into the server and decided to see if it would boot into the Mac OS partition that I discovered was there as I backed up everything... sure enough it booted into Mac OS and of course I had a utility that could boot Linux from Mac OS, so boom! It's working.
A secondary issue is that my router machine does not power-on after it's been off for a while (hence the UPS), and to get it to power on requires lots of on-off-on-off... there's something wrong with the motherboard... So I'm using my wireless router's firewall... that meant changing some internal IPs since the webserver was on a DMZ and it's own subnet.
To top it all off A big black squirrel chewed through another string of LED christmas lights (this time they were ON).
