11:34 PM

Wow, what a waste of a day I could have spent sleeping.

So it turns out that Lower Corte’s problems weren’t due to some worm, but rather a conflict between Norton Personal Firewall and one of the recent Microsoft updates. I only have a hunch that it’s Norton Personal Firewall — I have no proof to support it, nor do I care enough to actually acquire such evidence.

Last night I went ahead and took a look at it again while Merrystar was cleaning up; it took about 30 minutes to boot into Windows from the CD and attempt the repair steps outlined in the aforementioned links. (Actually, this step took about 2 hours, because of some wonkiness with Tigana’s boot process that wouldn’t let it go from CD boot to CD boot, but instead required a boot into Linux). That didn’t work, so I tried it again (old stupid Windows habits die hard). Then, I deleted six *.dll files to force Windows 2000 to replace them all, which it did, and I could finally boot into Windows after another hour or so. An installer kept popping up asking for Norton’s Firewall disk, so I tried uninstalling it; unfortunately, something happened with the Windows Installer software and the program wouldn’t uninstall.

So, had I been really smart, I would have just reinstalled the firewall without even attempting to update anything. But no, I’m an idiot, so I decided to run Windows Update to fix the problem with Windows Installer.

Idiot.

So, there I am last night having spent 4 hours to get right back to square one. (Although, at least I knew how to get off square one: “Turn on the light.”) So I put away Tigana/Lower Corte and spent the rest of the evening with Merrystar.

Right. Today, Merrystar leaves on a trip, so I figure I’ll put on Stargate SG-1 Season 4 and see if I can get this piece of *($)#)*#$!!! working. (Note: I do not blame the machine; I blame the operating system. This is probably unfair. I don’t care. I want the time I spent back.) I go through the hoops and finally get Lower Corte booting again. I install NPF right on top of the old one and the error messages stop. I check connectivity and firewall and shut it down.

Now, a smart man would have cut his losses here and gone and painted a fence or clean the gutters or something.

I am not a smart man. (See idiot note, above.)

Instead, I thought I’d upgrade Tigana to redhat 9 (thus finally getting the USB optical mouse and wireless card to work) and Arbonne and Al-Rassan to Fedora Core 1. Let’s take them one at a time.

Al-Rassan was actually the easiest of the three, as she was already running Red Hat 9 and I could (and did) easily back up my home directory to Arbonne. The biggest problem was how long it took - I started it around noon and it finished around 4. The next biggest problem was that the background changed from the bluecurve to the fedora blue flower picture.

If that’s the second biggest problem in an upgrade, I’ll count it going pretty darn well. (Of course, I’m trying to run up2date and it’s taking hours to complete - that could be server problems, or something more serious.)

Once I’d established that Al-Rassan was okay, I took on Arbonne. Last weekend I yanked Windows off Arbonne, and the only real data on her was the home directory from Al-Rassan, so if everything went really wrong I could just reformat the drive and start over. The Fedora update also took some time, and everything seemed to be going well until I tried rebooting; at that point the boot seemed to hang on searching for new hardware. Arbonne is still trying to boot - I’ll give her some more time, but it’s been 42 minutes.

Tigana - ach, Tigana remains stubborn. She doesn’t have a built-in CD-ROM, so she needs a driver to boot from CD - a driver that’s mysteriously absent on the RH9 disk, but present on the RH7.2 one. Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

So. I think I’ll leave that one for another day.

Current count: Computers 3, Me 1. Ah, the drama of system administration.

Time to call it quits.