Well, I spent all day with the master kernel.org server failures.

It turns out that one of the Athlon fans died, so it's now down to one cpu, and two of the hard drives died, and one of them was wedging the 3ware linux driver. Replaced both of those drives (one of them was /dev/sda so there were boot issues to fix).

At about 9PM I had everything sorted out and I wondered how hpa knew the exact right time to skip town...