Linux Migration – Day Zero

My family computer is the second Dell we have had with XP Home for the kids gaming entertainment and dual booting Linux mainly for my doing the books. Under XP we have used open source applications for the most part: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org. So off to a great start for migration.

Prior to allowing kids to play on the computer my wife had been using Linux with our first Dell. Then she just stuck with XP instead of having to keep rebooting for the kids. They had acquired many educational and gaming CD’s over the years.

Recently I have inherited two higher end machines yet only one is complete and another just a cpu and motherboard. I have plans to use one for the family and the other for a server. Problem is I don’t care to shell out for a new XP license. I got by with the second Dell we inherited because we simply just plopped in our drive from the first Dell and kept on going. These new machines are not Dells.

Good Friday

Had our monthly Linux meeting last night! Was great to see some new faces. It’s a perfect chance to “get back to the basics”. Seems we do that a couple times a year. Our meetings tend to get a little dry when you hesitate to ask questions or do particular topics and such when you know your other members too well; or not well enough. You think you know what they are already interested in or know what they know already. So you don’t ask if they know how to fix this or if they have ever done that.

Ordered some great server equipment today at work! Getting some rack mount equipment and server. Want to place our existing PowerEdge 6400 into a contained rack to controll the heat and noise. Still need to talk with one of Dell’s engineers on that. But today I ordered a 48 port 10/100 4 port gigabit switch; 2 rj45 and 2 fiber. They even went down on their $999 price to $827! This included a free gb nic for the server. I also got a rack mount dual Xeon 2.4GHZ Raid 5 with 32GB SCSI drives. Planning to use this as the web/mail/file server.

Happy Easter! Planning to go to church tonight and then off to Anaconda for the weekend.

A new beginning

Lets see… what’s new since Friday?… Been tinkering with my new machine in the basement; planning to migrate my existing P200MMX box to this Athlon 900. I had installed RH8.0 on it via RedHat Install Server/NFS. I then rsynced the /home data over and migrated the groups and passwords and shadow files. All is well with the users! Now… once again… I’m having trouble with some lock down of the firewalling. I have since opened it all up and restarted. I was getting connected via ssh and http just fine… this morning I try logging in ssh remotely and no route! I have a feeling it may have something to do with lokkit but not totally sure. Anyway I may not mess with it too much since I’m now pulling RH9 iso’s down as I type this.

Purchased an entitlement for $60 today! This is primarily for work since they paid for it but I juggle a couple entitlements around freely now without high load error 50 spitting in my face. Of course to get the new iso’s too!

My workstation here at work is just about all configured to my liking again. Still haven’t gotten my old /home back. I did however get a new 80GB drive to install Linux to. I am hoping some time in the not so distant future I might find a way to recover my lost data. It’s only one years worth of stuff, but some personal stuff got lost too. Yeah I am backing it up to tape now… so spare me the lecture!

During my many re installations of the same non-RH stock apps previously used, I discovered that RH8.0 still didn’t fix the video bug with ATI Rage 128 cards. What happens is with some types of apps (don’t ask), such as rdesktop you may experience a full X lockup by moving or scrolling a remote window. In RH7.3, it turns out to be the enabled DRI setting in the xconfig file. Disabled this again solved my problem.

Saturday I got a postcard from Dell telling me they “…did not receive a packing slip with…” my rebate request. I got a flat panel monitor with my latest purchase back in January and it was with a $100 rebate. Instructions were to send in the rebate form with the packing slip which I did not get. I had to go online and reissue that and in the mean time I had via snail-mail, another piece of paper I thought was the packing slip and it showed the info they were looking for. Now I’m thinking this was the invoice rather than the packing slip. So now yesterday I could not even get their site to find my orders online! Called them up and they tell me after 30 days you can’t reissue these. So they had me fax this postcard back and they’d manually reissue it. We’ll see :-\