Update 1: Right, so here's what happened. I was remotely upgrading Rakim from FreeBSD 5.1 to 5.2. buildworld and buildkernel worked just fine. It was the install step that got me. Basically, it errored out midway through, and left my system in a very unusable state. As in "ls dumping core" unusable state. With one live SSH session into the machine, I'm trying to fix things so that it will actually come up when I finally type "reboot". Bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah bleah.

Update 2: OK, things are (provisionally) back up.