well, unfortunately when I woke up this morning (7:50 PST) I found my server had locked up. it couldn't've been long due to my irc connection timing out only a few minutes later, but when I tried to reboot grub could no longer find the kernel. I wasn't able to troubleshoot it at that moment, but once I get back home (about 12:30PST) I will start working on the fix immediately.