I started writing about the computers under my care really for just one reason: so that I would have some record of what I’d done, so I could stop making the same mistakes over and over again.

I don’t know if I’ve accomplished that, exactly, but at least it’s been entertaining watching me try.

Since many of you are new around here, and this is an admittedly quirky personal site, let me point you towards some other computer logs that may interest you:

Commissioned

The following computers are currently in service.

• Eöl, my new Black MacBook running OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard).

  Eöl replaced Vinyamar.

• Tsiolkovsky, my wife’s Toughbook W2, continues to crunch numbers and hang in there, despite losing the “B” key to a toddler-related accident a few weeks ago. The lower left hand side keyboard is also starting to have some problems, but there are no new issues to report with Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

  Tsiolkovsky is slated for replacement in the next few weeks.

• Hithlum, my 17” PowerBook G4, is as lovely and elegant as ever, even if her PPC chip is getting a little long in the tooth. She still does great work, however, and is running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger).
• An unnamed Thinkpad T43, my work computer, runs Windows XP and is completely uninteresting to me as a computer. My company gave it to me to work with, I work with it. End of story.
• Tigana, a Sony Vaio 505-TR running Red Hat 7.2, has a busted power supply and no battery power. I will need to wipe the hard drive before I can consider her decommissioned.

Speaking of which…

Decommissioned

These computers have left the building:

• Vinyamar, my Macbook Air, went through two revisions before being sent back to Apple.
• Al-Rassan / Ithilien, a Thinkpad 1400 running SuSE 9.x.
• Arbonne (I) / Sarantium / Atlantis / Lórien, a beige 750MHz Pentium III tower I picked up from CompUSA which ran Windows 98, Windows 2000, and more Linux distributions than I really care to remember.
• Arbonne (II) and Gorhaut, two identical Linux towers who ran Red Hat 9.

You will no doubt notice certain themes in the names.

Each computer has its own category, some with more information than others. Hopefully you’ll find something you like.

Thanks again for visiting!

Cheers,
Brett

Of course, my network decided to retaliate against the interloper:

• My POS replacement wireless router (D-Link DI-524, which I do not recommend) stopped talking to the cable modem. Hours wasted with hard resets and reprogramming and more hard resets finally resulted in a working internet connection.

• I rebooted Arbonne to restore her wireless connection - yes, I know that you shouldn’t have to reboot a Linux box, but this is the only thing that worked to solve whatever Netgear MA301 - DI-524 wierdness was going on - and she lost her boot loader on the reboot. Four days later, with numerous attempts at installing from the same CDs that would work on Tsiolkovsky, I dragged her upstairs and did a network install of SuSE 10.0.

• Tsiolkovsky’s upgrade? Not so good. Installer barfed in the middle and the computer was down for a frantic 24 hours as I tried to restore the bootloader so Merrystar could use the Windows partition.

• While playing around with the bluetooth on the Powerbook, I wiped my phone’s address book clean. Oops.

That was last weekend, which I am never doing again. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

Anyhow:

• Tsiolkovsky has been upgraded from RHEL 3.0 to SuSE 10.0 OSS. USB now works, though the wireless and automounter are still flaky. The Windows partition is now readable in Linux, which is a huge improvement.

• Arbonne has been converted into a headless server (no monitor, no desktop manager, no graphical environment) and has been renamed Lórien accordingly. Lórien is running SuSE 10.0 OSS, and her network problems continue - I couldn’t get the D-Link G card working at all, and the MA301 continues to fight with the wireless router. Also, I misbought a second 250GB drive, so I’m still running the 40GB drive for /. and the 250GB for /data. Oh, and I can’t access the internet from her for more than 10 seconds after boot with the wireless card. Grumble.

• Hithlum is my new Powerbook. She’s purty. I had originally named her Hísilómë, but all the accents didn’t translate well in the scripts and shells.

• My phone address updated flawlessly once I imported my contacts from Outlook to Address Book.app.

• Tigana remains as she ever has, running Windows 2000 and Red Hat 7.3. She slept through the whole debacle.

• A problem with the photo site that cropped up in the last few days has been fixed; Michal updated some of the apache security modules and a misspelling in my .htaccess file was no longer passed over with equanimity. If you’re still having problems, you may need to restart your browser session.

• Most of my recent activity has been over at Trip’s site, not here, but there’s been an intermittent problem with connections to the photo galleries on Arbonne dropping without reason. I suspect that the cause is some incompatibility with the Netgear MA301 wireless PC card and the new D-Link D524 wireless router I recently got, some wonky problem that will take weeks to find. Restarting network services doesn’t restore the connection; a full reboot is required, which is ridiculous. So I went out and got a faster D-Link card that I’ll upgrade to eventually.

• Speaking of upgrading Arbonne, I got another 250GB hard drive so that I can increase the size of my RAID 1 array from 40GB to 150 or so. (I back up other computers on my Arbonne, so this will function as further backup for them.) I’ve pretty much filled up the 40GB with my CD collection and photo galleries. However, as this upgrade involes the disk with the OS on it, I’m much more worried. Should I copy everything and restore it? Copy some and upgrade to SuSE 9.3? Fresh install time? Questions, questions. I’m sure I’ll dither about this for some time and then do a fresh install.

• The move to a G network has gone smoothly, for the most part. I installed a print server — why did I wait so long to do that? — and the new G cards work well. I still have problems with Tsiolkovsky’s built-in Centrino A/B card, but that’s Intel’s fault. No news on the RHEL 3 → FC 4 conversion; now that Merrystar’s back at work, I’m reluctant to touch any machine that actually works.

And that’s all the network news.

Arbonne, my PIII-700 desktop, is now running SuSE 9.1, from the 9.1 Personal CD. I downloaded apache, rsync, and emacs before figuring out how to configure YaST to install from an FTP site. Overall I'm quite pleased with SuSE, but I've read some things about Novell's changes that may not bode well for a lasting relationship with this distro. The configuration was really easy compared to Fedora and Red Hat, but I'm now wary of corporate meddling after Red Hat's Enterprise debacle.

Anyhow, Arbonne is functioning as the primary server again after a few weeks of being hosed by my yum update from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 2. (Mostly due to the change between XFree86 and Xorg, I think. I'm not going to go back to try to replicate.) I was rereading my installation notes for Red Hat 9, and they begin:

"Unplug the machine and move it to wherever your cable modem and router is currently located. At this time, that means take it upstairs, Brett. You cannot activate your wireless network card with the packages installed off the CD, and you will have to update your kernel as well. While you're lugging a desktop up the stairs, reconsider. By the time you get to the monitor, I bet you'll have thought of a better way to spend your weekend."

Good advice.

Al-Rassan, my Thinkpad i1400, made a brief reappearance this weekend. Her screen is stil dead, but I plugged her in to my work Thinkpad's power cord (no recharge, but at least she turns on) and Arbonne's monitor and confirmed that everything still booted and that all data was off of it. (Yes, and yes.) I have been toying with the idea of making Al-Rassan the primary public computer and isolating Arbonne more; after looking at her again, this might not be a good idea.

When I ran yum to update the Fedora Core 2 installation, I ran out of disk space. I had 3.3 GB used and only 650 MB free - without any data files. I got rid of some of the bigger packages I was pretty sure I'd never use on it again (openoffice.org, for one) and was able to update everything, but I'm still running low on space (about 900 MB free.) For a server, this is a real weakness. One way around this would be to accept the screen death and uninstall X and all the user-friendly GUI programs. This would free up about 2 gigs of space, if I remember the Fedora Core installs right.

But turning Al-Rassan into a non-graphical machine means I'm only using it as a server, and that's already handled by Arbonne - and Arbonne has about 33 GB free, even with all my data files. So I'd either need to abstain from graphic and sound files, or get a bigger hard drive. Neither option is appealing. I already have a server set up that takes up enough of my time. If I want to use Al-Rassan on an ongoing basis, I'm already going to need to replace the external power pack. Do I really need to get a new hard drive, too?

I could install another, smaller distro on Al-Rassan to free up some more space, but that avoids the real question - what's this computer for? I now use Tigana as my main puttering laptop. I don't need another laptop - at least not one that's slower and bulkier and louder and has no screen. And as a server, I'll have to invest some money - not a lot, but some - to get it working again. Like many folks, I initially thought a laptop would make a great server because of the battery backup in case of power failure. It's true, it will save the computer from crashing. But you're still offline, unless your modem and router are both also on battery backup. Mine aren't, and I don't see putting them on it anytime soon.

But as I was working on Al-Rassan, I thought, you know, this might make a good guest computer. Just put a monitor, keyboard, and mouse on it and it's a low-profile, small desktop. For guests it wouldn't matter that there's not a lot of disk space, and it can still handle things like web browsing and email. I'll keep this in mind as I get more spare parts - I'll want to replace Arbonne's monitor eventually.

Tigana, Merrystar's old Vaio 505-TR, continues to run Red Hat 7.2 just fine. I've patched it with the latest updates from fedoralegacy.org, and wireless with WEP works on it now, which is really all I ever needed to switch over to Linux. There's a Windows 2000 installation on it, but I only boot into it to occasionally install some critical security updates. I manually installed Mozilla 1.7, since Firefox requires GTK and I'm not willing to install a whole bunch of things on a system that already just works. I don't mess around with it, it doesn't mess around with me, and that's what I tell myself everytime I think I should upgrade it to 7.3.

The T key still falls off occasionally, the space bar doesn't always work, and one of the mouse butons is kaput. But it's sub-3 pounds and just works, so I won' be replacing it anytime soon. I mean, if someone wants to get me a Panasonic R3, I'm not going to turn it down. (Far, far from it.) But I'm not really ready to go blow a couple grand on yet another computer. (If I do, the next machine name to be used is probably Sarantium, although Soryyia is a close second.)

So now you're all caught up on my sysadmin drama.

"I just installed SuSE. I can't believe I wasted so much time on Red Hat and Fedora," I said.

Her eyebrow didn't move.

"There were no problems. It detected the network card immediately. All I had to do was enter the SSID and WEP key and it was online. It installed mostly everything that I wanted, and not very much that I didn't; and getting emacs off their site wasn't difficult at all. Damn it!"

"That's nice, dear," she said. I think she's used to this by now. I stomped back downstairs to continue cursing at something that actually worked out of the box, instead of requiring hours of configuration to get it running.

This morning I came downstairs and everything was still working on Arbonne. I installed rsync so I could reload our home directories off of Tigana. I changed a few of the window behaviors because I wanted to.

Argh! Linux is supposed to be hard, not easy! Especially to configure!

Wait a minute. Whatsa meesa thinking?

So, I finally updated all the packages and was pretty sure that I was ready to try rebooting and launching into Fedora Core 2 and the 2.6.x kernel, especially since my screen went blank when I logged out this morning. I sshed into Arbonne from Tigana, did a quick shutdown -r now, and watched the screen come alive with the standard scrawling text.

Then when I got to the point where the X server starts up, I got a blank screen. Argh! C'mon, Charlie Brown, kick the football!

So there are some hopeful bug reports out there that may have some clues as how to fix this, and when I reboot into the 2.4 kernel it works fine. Also, I've had Fedora Core 2 working on Arbonne before, so it's not a hardware issue. I've got everything kinda configured so that I can use Arbonne (webserver's down, though, not sure why yet) but I have to ask myself, is it really worth it? I asked myself that earlier this week, but I dodged the question at the time. Now I'm writing this on a computer running Red Hat 7.2 that just works. End of story. (Okay, the T key is flaky, and I'd like to get the second mouse buton working again, but those are hardware issues.)

So then, once I finally get X running and log in, everything's just slightly - off. The icons are all smaller. The font looks different, even though it probably isn't. I am dismayed at all the little things I'll need to change. And that doesn't count all the big things! But oh look, the user icons are all cute! (Copy those to my home directory... ) Don't I have other things to do?

Am I bored wth computers that aren't broken? Do I somehow actually enjoy this?

What a horrifying thought.

All of the twisting and turning and pulling and cursing to get the wireless interface running on Arbonne finally paid off - not on Arbonne, who has been up for a week or two, but on Tigana, Merrystar's old Sony Vaio 505-TR that is still running Red Hat 7.2. (Newer distros don't recongize the old Sony PCMCIA CD-ROM drive.) A few changes to the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and the netgear card finds the WEP key on bootup.

Of course, my yum addiction continues, thanks to this handy page at the Fedora Legacy Product. Why switch off 7.2 now? USB support? Poppycock.

Huzzah!

I know I said I'd wait until November to upgrade Arbonne to Fedora Core 3. I know that there's no absolute pressing need to upgrade. I know Fedora Core 2 let me down, and the constant upgrade path bit me in the ass before. (Actually, now that I think about it, most all the entries in this category are from disasters along the upgrade path. Damn hamster wheel!) I know all of this.

But all of that pales before the simplicity of editing /etc/yum.conf to point to the Fedora repositories, running yum -y upgrade a few times to find all the dependencies, rpm -e to all the dependencies, and then yum -y upgrade one last time. Wait a few hours, or maybe a day or two to download everything, and realize that a watched upgrade doesn't finish. The excitement! What new things will I get? Will it work? Will I need to rebuild my system? Will I leave a smoking hole in my office? I don't know, but it's fantastic!

Whatsa meesa doing?

It all started the day before I left for Ryan and Sarah's wedding. I hadn't learned my lesson yet:

Even now, I don't know what actually happened. The GRUB bootloader on Arbonne -- then called Yorktown, and temporarily named Al-Rassan in a fit of nostalgia -- couldn't find the recently-upgraded kernel and, therefore, couldn't boot. My efforts to get around this little problem all failed - even the boot disk I'd created could only get me to a terminal prompt to make sure the home directory was still intact. I left for vacation with a busted server, which was a worry I could have done without.

I came back and the vacation had done me good, though it had not gotten Arbonne (as I now thought of it again, having recognized my mistake of having named it after one machine that had already died) back up in service. I figured out how to get the DVD-ROM working again - did you know there's a little bridge in the back that sets it as a master or slave? I do now. The CD-ROM is still kaput, but now that I had something that could read a CD I could at least try to reinstall GRUB, or some other bootloader.

Long story short: Fedora Core 2 disks still don't work, but Red Hat 9 disks do, therefore, Red Hat 9 won. Despite my grumbling about it, I would have rather had Fedora Core because everything was already configured for it. And updates are easier, when they don't shut down your whole system.

Now that things are running right again, I should remember the lesson I learned: not broken, don't fix. It took three weeks to get back to where I was before things went wonky, and I don't know if it was because of something actually going wrong or my tinkering. I'm inclined to think it was the latter, as I have no proof otherwise.

But somehow, despite all of this, I think I'll still upgrade to Fedora Core 3 when it's released in November. Some people never learn.

I do know why I can SSH into arbonne from work, but can't see the web server - even though I can see it on the network. Cox Cable blocks port 80, the bastards. I'll have to reconfigure to port 8080 or somesuch nonsense to get it working.

Foolishness!

Ah, the power.

Sweeeeet.

(Now I just need to finish changing Arbonne from Fedora to Slackware...)

Things were going so swimmingly, too - things were really starting to come together on that machine. Then I dropped it and caused the AC adapter to stop working. Everything else was fine, but the battery stopped charging and I couldn't get it to come back on. I cracked open the case to make sure there wasn't anything loose, but didn't find any problems. So finally I sealed her up and figured I'd wait to see what I could do.

This morning, on a whim, I took the power pack from my work Thinkpad and tried it. Voila! Worked fine - thankfully. So now I've just got to find a replacement on eBay to get Al-Rassan back up and running.

In the meantime, I tried once again to upgrade Tigana to a more recent distro than Redhat 7.2: this time, Fedora 2. No such luck. Still can't get the CD-ROM to be recognized (even though I boot off of it.) What the heck is up with that? My next trick will be to try to install 7.3 on it and see if that gives me network/USB support.

In the meanwhile, I'm getting reacquainted with Arbonne. She's still a good machine, after all these years.

Next up: installing SELinux on Al-Rassan.

Huzzah!