tigana log.

I’m tickled pink about all the visitors around this site. Thank you for coming! I’m really happy you’re here; please feel free to drop me a line or twitter me and let me know how it’s going.

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

I finally had had enough of trying to get Linux to work on 6-year old equipment. The problems I’d been having with Arbonne were the last straw. So, last weekend I went out (with Merrystar’s encouragement) and got a Powerbook (17-inch) and couldn’t be happier with it.

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.

I spent a few hours Saturday morning taking stock of my network, because it’s what I do at 5:45 on a Saturday morning when I can’t sleep. Merrystar is good about not killing me when I wake up obscenely early and march downstairs to engage in my computer drama issues.

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’ve finally got everything mostly on Tigana the way I want it, thogh it would be nice to have USB support so I could use a mouse instead of the gimpy trackpad. Haivng GTK so I could run Firefox would be nice, too; even though I’m using KDE on Arbonne, I’ve gotten used to the really nice fonts. So perhpas I should see how Fedora 3 works and try some of the kernel boot parameters to see if it installs correctly.

Wait a minute. Whatsa meesa thinking?

I was going to shout Huzzah! again, because I’ve completed upgrading Arbonne to Fedora Core 2. The standard http downloads took too long and timed out frequently, so I ended up mounting the ISO images I got off Bittorrent (thank goodness for the torrent) and copying the RPMs into a yum repository as the base. Actually, that was pretty sweet. If nothing else, I’ve learned a lot about yum and package management this week. Last week it was networking - always something to learn when you’re running Linux.

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.

Huzzah!

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!

Sometimes, I amaze myself with my stupidity. It masquerades as stubbornness, but really it’s stupidity.

See, to celebrate all my recent work in my garden I decided to see if my computer kung-fu had improved any and try to get Tigana back in tip-top shape. For those following allong at home, she had the following problems:

• Installing any windows update causes a catastophic OS crash, requiring hours of reinstalling DLLs to fix.
• The left mouse button no longer works, so we use a small optical USB mouse now. However, Red Hat 7.2 doesn’t support USB mice.
• The wireless card works normally under Windows, and can work under Red Hat, but not with WEP enabled.
• Any recent Linux installation (Red Hat 9, Fedora X, even Slackware 10) runs into problems with the PCMIA CD-ROM drive on the 505TR. The web advice (assigning an ide2 value) hasn’t worked.
• The ‘T’ key is loose and comes off every once in a while.

So, because I’m an idiot, I though I should spend some time actually trying to *fix* these problems. Stupid, stubborn, idiot. I decided to tackle the problems one at a time, first reinstalling the Windows partition. This did not go well. Not that it went poorly, but it took about 4 hours all told, and then before I connected to the internet I reinstalled Norton Personal Firewall.

NPF worked for all of one boot before an error dialog kindly informed me that my security settings were all FUBARed and I should reinstall the software. I did so. Twice. Thrice. Five times I reinstalled that software, eventually deleting every Symantec-related file I could find.

No luck.

So here I am, stuck without a firewall on an unpatched win2k box. I know that there’s no way I can patch it fast enough before it’s compromised. So I turn to my old nemesis, ZoneAlarm. I download it quickly, turn off the wireless card, and get it set up and running. So far, so good.

Then I notice that the USB mouse - you know, the one that’s required to make the damn machine work - is flaking out and freezing up. The touchpad still works fine, but not the external mouse.

While I’m running Windows Update I check it out on the web, and sure enough other people have had problems with ZoneAlarm causing USB weirdness. I don’t know which I’m more pissed off at now - ZoneAlarm, for making such an intrusive program, or Microsoft, who shipped Win2K without a firewall. It’s perhaps the only benefit I see to running Windows XP.

So now I’m presented with a dilemma; firewall and flaky mouse, or no firewall, insecure box, but a working mouse. These are not the sort of choices I like to make. So I turn to the Linux side to see if maybe I can salvage some shreds of adminisrative dignity. (The smart admin would have gone outside and built another garden bed. I’m not so smart.)

The WEP appears to not work because the Wireless Exensions package is version 11, and I need version 15. That appears at least fixable, with a little research. The USB problem likely requires rebuilding the kernel, which I don’t have the source code for. But I remain hopeful that if I can upgrade the distro, it’ll all work out.

Of course, every disro I tried - with the exception of Red Hat 7.2, which is already on Tigana - failed to load the proper CD-ROM driver and barfed the install. Some of them (Fedora, cough, cough) spewed code all over the screen before I terminated Anaconda. Others just sat there and waited… and waited… and waited…

Got old, quick.

All the while I’m lusting after Tsiolkovsky, happily playing DVDs right next to me in bed. Is that wrong?

Dealing with computers is so unsatisfying.

Shoot. Power problems reared their ugly head with Al-Rassan yesterday.

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.

So, problems on the laptop front tonight.

Tigana / Lower Corte’s battery has been going more and more quickly. I originally wrote that there wasn’t much life left in it, but then Merrystar looked over and corrected me - she said she’d been working for an hour and a half and running the usb optical mouse and wireless card. So I sit corrected.

However, my laptop’s a different story.

Al-Rassan’s battery’s been all but dead since I got her. In and of itself, that’s not a problem; I don’t take my laptop outside the house, so I just use the power cord. But now the cord’s getting flaky, so I have to balance Al-Rassan and hope that I don’t let the orange power light go out.

So.

Why can’t things just work and keep working?

Ah, more network drama. So after writing the above post last night, I thought I’d update some of the most egregious patches from last year on Tigana (Lower Corte), once again demonstrating that I’m an idiot. I thought, in some sleep-deprived haze, that if I just avoided the patches from February I’d be okay.

I was wrong.

So, I left fixing Tigana (Lower Corte) for this morning, which I did with some dispatch. I turned off automatic updates, ran disk defragmenter a half-dozen times, and then turned her off.

Arbonne, on the other hand, never finished finding hardware and had remained frozen where she was all night long. I powered her down and decided to try a complete reinstall of Fedora Core. That didn’t work - still hung on the hardware search. I then tried a minimal installation with the same result. So I chucked Fedora and reinstalled Red Hat 9 on Arbonne.

At some point this becomes rewarding, right?

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.

So after updating Tigana with the latest round of Microsoft security updates, I rebooted last night into the following error:

The Logon User Interface DLL msgina.dll failed to load.
Contact your system administrator to replace the DLL, or restore the original DLL.

Restart.

Great. Just fucking great. How long is this going to take me to fix?

Fortunately, I just turned off the computer last night and didn’t lose any sleep over it, but still - argh.

Right. So, here’s a possible explanation from Microsoft, if you ignore that the computer in question already had SP 4, not SP 3, and here’s a potential fix. If that doesn’t work, there’s an another way to do it.

It was precisely because I was tired of dealing with shit like this that I deleted Windows off Arbonne this past weekend.

Well, that’s quite a difference.

Spent tonight setting up cable modem and wireless network. I’ve been grouchy about the whole project for some time - I didn’t want to spend additional money on something that only I’d really use - so finally I cut my cell phone bills by $20/month and will cancel the dialup account (also $20/month), which gave my conscience the permission it somehow needed to get a high-speed wireless connection.

I have strange hangups. I admit it.

My biggest concern was with the cable company - I don’t trust them, even though they’ve been less apt to price gouge than, say, my cell phone company. I really hate dealing with my cell phone company, and can’t wait until LWNP (local wireless number portability) goes into effect this November. But, overall, it was much more pleasant dealing with the cable company.

Did I just say that? Someone please hit me.

Right. So. I drag my tower (Sarantium) downstairs to where the live cable outlet is early this evening and hook up the cable modem. I do this because I’m not letting the cable company’s software anywhere near Merrystar’s laptop, Tigana. You will in fact have to shoot me before I let them mess with her internet settings litke that. But, and this is wonderful, there’s software that you need to run once to register, and it only runs on Windows - actuallly, I could have said I have a game box or something like that, or pressed the point about a non-Windows solution, but I didn’t - well, I thought it only ran on Windows, so I drag the tower and monitor downstairs to watch Merrystar play Atari whilst I get the cable modem working. Soon it is, and then it’s the wireless router’s turn.

Nothing worked. Absolutely nothing! Argh! Then I had a flash, put the install CD back in the drive, and reinstalled the router software. I had to reset the router twice and get rid of all the stupid changes I’d made before, but eventually everything was conifgured. I got Sarantium’s firewall set up to handle the new configuration, and then - as I’d just reinstalled the operating system(s) last night in a sucessful attempt to get the computer to recognize itself on the network - proceeded to do the Windows Update dance. So much faster now! I can almost remember what it was like to just have a list of software sites and download whatever the latest versions were. (Almost.)

While Sarantium was patching, I got Al-Rassan out and ran up2date on her. Then I browsed the web until Sarantium finished and I rebooted her into Linux, where she got the up2date treatment, too. I then disconnected everybody from the network and dragged them upstairs again, reassuring a somewhat concerned Merrystar that Sarantium wasn’t going to live permanently in our kitchen.

So.

I’m in bed, a floor away from the router, typing away. I’m not so grouchy anymore about high-speed access.

Just don’t ask me about my cell service provider.

The past few weeks have turned into one protracted case of writer’s block. After all the effort to make this an easy-to-update process, and I’ve contributed a bunch of links. Woo hoo. Part of it has been real life: Merrystar’s hard drive crashed and I had to install a new one and rebuild her Windows partition, my Windows installation went haywire and had to be rebuilt, Linux isn’t cooperating with my internet connection, my laptop at work died, I killed two other computers at work…

Oh yeah, and there’s this rather significant life event to plan.

And the Olympics. Can’t forget those pesky Winter Olympics. Especially curling.

So part of it is quite easy to explain: writing is hard.

But part of it is because I feel that what I have to say isn’t interesting. I watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop on places like slashdot and I wonder where the hell all the content went. I read flamewars over separating design from content, wondering what the content feels about it all, where it went, and if it’s nice there.

Merrystar and I had an argument about that last one. Why should you use CSS if you design simply with the HTML 3 standards in mind, avoiding things like gratutious <FONT> tags? Assuming a small (under ten pages) site, if you kept your design simple to begin with, why spend the effort to change?

It’s like this creeping malaise has me in its grasp, saying “what you have to say is worthless, so sit down, shut up and fuck off.” The more I read, the more I watch, the less I talk.

I have become quiet and reserved. I don’t like it, not one bit.