Beaglebone. Help me with strange data loss issue.

[kennie.still]

I just got my beaglebone in two days ago. Within a few hours my friend and I had lighttpd with php serving a basic webpage available externally on the internet. We were very pleased with our progress, and everything seemed to go as smoothly as is possible with a little bit of expected troubleshooting here and there.

It worked great at 1:00am today (I was getting the web page over 3G on my iphone). I went straight to sleep, and when I woke up the webpage wouldn't show up. Hmmm, strange. I ssh'd into the beaglebone and tried to run some basic commands. Lighttpd was gone. Sudo (which we had installed) was unrecognized, .conf files were missing. Everything was out of whack.

I didn't touch a thing. It went from working to not working all by itself in a few hours. What gives? Some of the stuff we did was still there (like the user I created and some files that I had ftp'd over).

What gives? How did all that data get lost all by itself? I thought linux was supposed to be stable? Am I going to reliably use this to control my sprinkler system? I'm a little upset with it. I can get over it if I broke it, but it seemed to break itself.