What was the reason this time that game was down 11-12 hrs ago?

You touch yourself at night.

sorry, was going to post up an explanation; somehow, the / partition ran out of inodes; when i was trying to upgrade the kernel and it wasn't working, i thought "maybe if i reboot"

Wrong move lol...

Partially because I hadn't run grub-update since the latest HD went in (after the slowness in Feb) I think; anyway, it didn't know where the HD's were

I had to tether my other machine to my phone, download a recovery iso, put it on a USB, and then fight with the damned thing.... and then the grub boot recovery tool wouldn't run (it complained about needing to close package managers, which i definitely didn't have open); so i had to figure out how to do everything manually from the command line...

i knew you do that.

Running out of inodes on the root partition? Sounds like you have either a really small partition, or a major problem with millions of small/empty files on that partition. For instance, if you have a 10G ext4 partition, it should have enough room for about 500K files by default, 60G should have room for 3M files, etc. You can't increase the amount of inodes on an existing partiton iirc, but you can manually specify how many you want when you make a new one, or you can just make a new larger partition.

I suggest either finding the problem of why you have flufftons of files, or at least make a new partition with sufficient inodes and copy over all the data to the new partition.

real reason was he was backing up his porn.