www.wpxi.com/slideshow/weather/3740179/detail.html?qs=1&s=1&dm=ss&p=weather

Look at all the lovely pictures of Pittsburgh and what Irene did to it.  We haven’t had flooding out here even close to this since anyone can remember.  I was not trapped in this.  I was in downtown Pittsburgh after work on Friday desperately trying to find a place to stay.  Why do you ask?  It seems that a state of emergency was declared on my town of Etna.  I’ve been staying at my wonderful girlfriends house ever since then.

Getting back to Etna today was not fun either.  3 ways to get in to town.  Only one way not barricaded with mudslides across the road.  That last way was difficult too because only Etna residents and cleanup crews were allowed in the area.  I have nothing with me that has my Etna address on it.  That cop was nice so he let me go. 

Get back to my home.  Anthony knows how large a hill I live on so no flood damage.  I was just hoping it would still be there with all the mudslides I was hearing about.

And that’s my weekend.

i saw a hummer today with license:

i8asuv

: )

So my programming job is becoming more of a sysadmin job lately, which is cool, because I love sysadmin type stuff.  One of the things I’m working on is a unified backup scheme to backup our Linux servers, Mac OS9 and OSX servers and workstations, and Windows 2000/XP workstations.  This is actually fairly straightforward if you can manage to get rsync installed on all the machines, and get your local network punk admin to open port 873 on all the clients.  Linux and OSX already have rsync, and there’s a nice free version for Windows called cwRsync too.  Then it’s just a matter of mounting the OS9 systems’ drives on the OSX machines, and you’ve got them all covered.

Also straightforward is the destination for all the backups: just buy a nice 500GB external firewire hard drive and you’re all set.  Erm... until you hook it up and realize that your backup server is Red Hat Linux 8 running an ancient kernel, and by ancient I mean 2.4.backWhenFirwireWasStillExperimental.  Sure, the firewire modules will load, and you can partition your shiny new backup drive, but the whole system hardlocks after you transfer a little data to it.

A kernel upgrade would solve the problem.  But in the Changes file distributed with each kernel, there’s a list of about 15 dependencies (make, binutils, etc) and their required versions.  I would have had to upgrade more than half of them before I could install the new kernel.  And as I’ve said before, manually upgrading dependencies on a Linux system is a real pain.

So I decided to try installing yum.  Yum is the package manager used by Fedora Linux, and since Fedora is basically the new version of Red Hat, I thought maybe I’d be able to install it and have it automatically take care of the hassle of upgrading all those dependencies.  It installed OK, but didn’t run quite right, so I asked my friendly neighborhood Fedora guru (that would be Kev) for some help.

It turns out that you can actually upgrade a Red Hat 8 system to Fedora Core 2 quite simply.  All I had to do was:

1. Install yum, but I already did that.
2. rpm -Uvh fedora-release-2-4.i386.rpm
3. Replace the default /etc/yum.conf with Kev’s
4. yum -y upgrade

Step 4 gave me some trouble at first (something about an unresolvable interdependency between glibc and glibc-common), but I tried it again the next day or so, and it downloaded some new headers which must have cleared things up.  It installed/updated a few thousand packages automatically, and before I knew it, my Red Hat box was a Fedora box : )

Extra super thanks to Kev for helping me through this.  Though I later found out that at least one website explains this process, I would never have guessed it was even possible, so I didn’t look for it.

Anyway, all I was after was a kernel upgrade, but I had actually been talking with the guys at work about getting this old box upgraded to either Fedora or Gentoo... and now it’s done.  I’m very happy.  And now I have some peace of mind knowing that the data around our lab and the others we administer is actually backed up.

These are two of the funniest things I’ve come across in a long, long time:

When I least expect it!  Ahahaha... pure genius.

I found them at knoble.org, which I saw in my visitor log.

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(You have to imagine Brittany’s comments in white text on a blinding neon pink background for full effect.)

(22:03:26) CawntryGirl92: hey
(22:04:06) Me: hey
(22:04:25) CawntryGirl92: wats up
(22:05:04) Me: sysadmining.... who is this?
(22:05:23) CawntryGirl92: brittany
(22:05:39) Me: do I know you?
(22:06:06) CawntryGirl92: i don’t think so
(22:06:36) Me: that’s interesting... were you born in 1992?
(22:06:47) CawntryGirl92: yup y
(22:10:30) CawntryGirl92: what your name
(22:11:13) Me: Arphaxad.... how did you get my screenname?
(22:11:28) CawntryGirl92: someone gave it to me
(22:11:38) Me: someone who knows me?
(22:11:44) CawntryGirl92: yes
(22:11:53) Me: who would that be?
(22:12:09) CawntryGirl92: i think kelsey
(22:12:20) Me: Kelsey......
(22:12:28) CawntryGirl92: sanders
(22:12:44) Me: hm, I definitely don’t know anyone with that name
(22:13:08) CawntryGirl92: ok
(22:13:19) CawntryGirl92: r u a boy or girl
(22:14:00) Me: a boy, why
(22:14:16) CawntryGirl92: just wondering
(22:14:58) CawntryGirl92: do u go to castle
(22:15:13) Me: what is "no."
(22:15:42) CawntryGirl92: what school do u go to and how old r u
(22:15:47) CawntryGirl92: ??
(22:16:04) Me: Penn State and 23
(22:16:16) CawntryGirl92: really
(22:16:48) CawntryGirl92: and u don’t no kelsey sanders
(22:17:38) Me: that is *more* surprising now that you know I’m 11 years older than you?!?
(22:17:49) CawntryGirl92: yup
(22:18:35) CawntryGirl92: and i don’t no where i got your s/n
(22:18:43) Me: that much is clear
(22:18:50) CawntryGirl92: yup
(22:19:56) CawntryGirl92: do u have any younger bros or sister
(22:20:47) Me: maybe, but I don’t want to tell you too much about me, in case you’re a serial killer
(22:21:09) CawntryGirl92: no i’m not
(22:21:15) CawntryGirl92: r u
(22:21:44) Me: for all you know, yes
(22:22:04) CawntryGirl92: thats scary
(22:22:13) Me: not to me
(22:22:22) CawntryGirl92: lol

Apparently "unsafe abortions" kill 70,000 women per year.

Aw, what a shame.

"Safe" abortions kill 1.4 million people per year in the US alone.

So I’m putting Linux on my mom’s computer.  There are tons of reasons to NOT use Windows, and literally just a couple in its favor (Quicken, TurboTax), which Crossover Office will solve on Linux anyway, for $50 or so.

I figured I’d install Fedora, because 1) it’s supposed to be an easy desktop distro, and 2) it’s really popular so I’d like to learn it.  I run Gentoo on my box, and of course I know that inside out, but wanted to install the "easy" distro for my mom/sister to use.

But so far, Fedora is anything but easy.  The default kernel doesn’t support firewire nor NTFS, so I couldn’t copy mom’s data from Windows without recompiling the kernel.  Red Hat has removed the MP3 support from XMMS due to "patent issues" so I had to manually find and download the MP3 plugin for an MP3 player... ridiculous.

The GUI-based printer setup is ridiculous.  The driver options are all obscure and meaningless (no "Epson", "HP", etc).  If you click on something like "PCL 5e" you get a sub-menu with some hplj drivers, but my printer is an Epson.  There’s an Epson driver under "Dot Matrix" but this is 2004... my printer isn’t dot-matrix.

The search-from-URL in Mozilla just plain doesn’t work, for no good reason.  It works fine on Gentoo, fine on WinXP, but on Fedora it says "The URL is invalid and cannot be loaded."  No kidding fool, it’s not a URL, you’re supposed to *search* for it.  Ugh...

And yum is a nightmare.  It’s slow as crap, and almost every time I run it, one of the initial ~10 servers it tries to contact times out.  Instead of being sensible and moving right along, yum waits for 3 minutes.  For.  Each.  Freaking.  One.  And then, if I want to, say, "yum search thunderbird," it insists on first looking for updated packages for ALL THE PACKAGES on my system.  Yeah, that’s brilliant.  I really want that to happen every time I want to just search for one package.

I think I’m going to end up just putting Gentoo on here after all.  It’s not all bubbly like RedHat/Fedora but at least it’s logical and it works... and at this point, it’s definitely easier to use than Fedora.  Maybe in a year or two Fedora will mature and be reasonable.