17 Aug 2006
The Agony of Technology

Not only did I have to replace my printer this week, we've blown two used ISDN routers as well. I've got a new Cisco 804 on order, and it's shipped but hasn't arrived. That'll be fun when it gets here - hopefully it's just the cheap, used Netgear routers we've been using that've been blowing like Monica, but we'll see. If it's something in the environment (as in the ISDN line itself) we're screwed. There's nothing quite like getting AT&T to provision ISDN to a farmhouse...

But wait! There's more! I've also been setting up a SuSE Linux server for a client, and remembering the absolute agony of Linux software installation and configuration. Once you get it up and running, you're good to go, but gods help the non-geek trying to set up and navigate through this "free" system. Sometimes you really do get that you pay for.

An example: the partitioning utility for SuSE 10.1 will cheerfully allow you to set up partitions on your drive larger than 16 GB - even if your BIOS doesn't support them! It'll just cause the whole installer to bomb with an utterly cryptic error message several steps (and about 30 minutes) later, and then restart itself.

Additionally, when you're setting up your X server, they never tell you what "Test" means or does. Turns out it does little if anything. So when you have your system completely misconfigured, and X won't start, you have no idea why. And they never bother telling you anywhere, in the manuals or the help system, that CTRL-ALT-BACKSP will stop a running X server. Hel, I'd forgotten that tidbit myself, but mercifully I have a shelf of sysadmin books to which I can refer.

The default fonts on the Gnome desktop look like something an eye doctor would use to test your vision - from 100 yards! KDE is better, and multiple desktops are nice, but they'd confuse the Hel out of a newbie or a switcher.

If this had been my mother or one of my daughters setting it up they'd be running Windows by now out of sheer frustration. Linux may be an industrial strength server, but it's still not ready for consumer prime time.

As if all this wasn't enough, I decided to upgrade my Perl installation on the Ravenbanner server today to 5.8 from 5.05. The newer version uses Unicode for everything, which broke the blog - the cache for the calendar had the wrong byte order! So I had to rebuild that, too, which means that some permalinks to posts by date will be broken, with no way to recover.

Suffice it to say that it's been a nightmare of a week. And I'm only moaning about my technical issues: I've not even mentioned the mysterious pile of dog shit that showed up in the spare bedroom one night, the raging infection in the goat's hooves, or the peacock roosting one night in the henhouse and setting the whole thing into an uproar. Which dropped production by two dozen a day for two days - we're back to normal now, but I'm 5 dozen short for my delivery tomorrow morning.

Think I'm gonna go have a beer or two. Or three.

21:06 /Home | 5 comments | permanent link

North Korea may be preparing nuclear bomb test: report

Just what we need...

Reuters - North Korea may be preparing an underground test for a nuclear bomb, ABC News said on Thursday, citing unidentified U.S. officials.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

20:27 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link