the drawback
Nov. 4th, 2005 00:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
piranhaof running debian is that things so rarely go wrong, that i've always forgotten how i solved a similar problem the last time. the system had been up without a hiccup for 250+ days.
today we had the first of our winter power outages. when aegis, the server came back up it kernel-panicked. by the time i finally found my notes (which kindly informed me that i had to add the initial ramdisk to the lilo config file after the last kernel upgrade, which i had forgotten to do), the paramour had gotten around to that via a different path. :)
and then we had network trouble. we always do; two of the NICs doesn't get auto-detected. these are cheap cards, do you think i remember what driver they need? hell, no. back to search for notes. the paramour went to bed (smart move). it didn't take me that long to figure it out when i didn't find any notes, but being that this isn't the first time, i should get my damn act together.
and then my win XP machine didn't want to play well with samba. it never does; it's so bad that i have taken everything but the WINS server away from it, and made aegis the primary domain controller. still, it seems that when aegis goes down, after it comes up, XP does not want to turn control back over, not even if i force a browser election. *grump*. this one really requires me to learn more about samba and how windows handles itself when communicating with it, and i don't know that i want to bother. this time it finally connected back up after i gave it back the WINS server, but i think that actually had nothing to do with it. it simply does have old, crappy data hanging around that it doesn't wipe when one would expect it to wipe it. *double grump*. *hates on microsoft*.
i resolve: i shall not keep notes about aegis start-up information in a file called "random.txt" in which i also store just about any other random tidbits i come across (such as the measurements for the bed i am going to build, instructions to make a cheap baren for woodblock printing, interesting quotes, egyptian gods, a snarky email i recided not to send, the japanese names for symmetry used in patterns, a couple of 5-question memes i forgot to post, etc). i shall put the aegis notes into their own file. i shall print that file. i shall affix the printout to aegis in a manner that does not attract cats.
today we had the first of our winter power outages. when aegis, the server came back up it kernel-panicked. by the time i finally found my notes (which kindly informed me that i had to add the initial ramdisk to the lilo config file after the last kernel upgrade, which i had forgotten to do), the paramour had gotten around to that via a different path. :)
and then we had network trouble. we always do; two of the NICs doesn't get auto-detected. these are cheap cards, do you think i remember what driver they need? hell, no. back to search for notes. the paramour went to bed (smart move). it didn't take me that long to figure it out when i didn't find any notes, but being that this isn't the first time, i should get my damn act together.
and then my win XP machine didn't want to play well with samba. it never does; it's so bad that i have taken everything but the WINS server away from it, and made aegis the primary domain controller. still, it seems that when aegis goes down, after it comes up, XP does not want to turn control back over, not even if i force a browser election. *grump*. this one really requires me to learn more about samba and how windows handles itself when communicating with it, and i don't know that i want to bother. this time it finally connected back up after i gave it back the WINS server, but i think that actually had nothing to do with it. it simply does have old, crappy data hanging around that it doesn't wipe when one would expect it to wipe it. *double grump*. *hates on microsoft*.
i resolve: i shall not keep notes about aegis start-up information in a file called "random.txt" in which i also store just about any other random tidbits i come across (such as the measurements for the bed i am going to build, instructions to make a cheap baren for woodblock printing, interesting quotes, egyptian gods, a snarky email i recided not to send, the japanese names for symmetry used in patterns, a couple of 5-question memes i forgot to post, etc). i shall put the aegis notes into their own file. i shall print that file. i shall affix the printout to aegis in a manner that does not attract cats.
no subject
on 2005-11-04 08:49 (UTC)I've got a little black hardcover-bound sketchbook that I keep on a shelf near the computer that has all my notes of this sort in it. Most of the time, I don't have too much trouble finding it. It's been remarkably useful. (It feels a bit silly that I've filled out maybe 20 pages of a 200-page book in the three and a half years I've had it, though.) I was, at one point, tempted to get a notebook in the 3"x5" size and make a shelf/receptacle for it that fit in a standard CD-drive bay; it still seems a sensible idea.
Lately, most of the NICs I've bought have been old 3Com 3c-whatevers from the local surplus store. $20 each for the PCI ones, and common as dirt so drivers aren't really a problem. ... Though, actually, I say that and I only remember buying one of them; most of my computers have the NIC in the motherboard. I've got several 3Com modems from surplus, though, which are nicely solid and reliable and unfortunately ISA.
Even with Windows-Windows connections, getting the machines to notice that things have changed on the network is a royal pain a lot of the time, I've found. A number of times, I've had apparently-unsolvable network problems that were fixed by rebooting one of the machines to get it to clear its connection cache. Turning the machines on in the right order seems to be important.
And I am quite amused at the contents of your random.txt. :)