My week as a geek

[mdlbear]

I've been rather busy at work this week -- two of my coworkers are going to be in Japan next week, and one of them (JB) is going to be installing a Linux server as one end of an experimental server-based messaging setup. My job over the last two or three weeks has been to get the thing configured; needless to say much was left for the last minute.

Debian and Dell mostly rhymes with Heaven and Hell, doesn't it?

Readers with memories that reach back to the beginning of the month may remember that I had ordered a rather vanilla Dell desktop machine (with a wasted copy of WinXP, which was $1000 cheaper than a server with no OS on it), but that I was having trouble finding a distro that supported Serial ATA and an Intel e1000 ethernet. Not to mention the Intel i865 graphics chip.

Luckily, the latest iteration of the Debian installer came out last week. Went on slick as glass (except for X, which still isn't working -- luckily it's a server and is going to be running headless anyway), and by Monday afternoon I had my experimental CGIs installed.

I then spent Tuesday and Wednesday fighting with Tomcat trying to get the servlets going. Thursday I called for backup; some of the servlets are now running. Somewhere between versions of Tomcat a whole bunch of obnoxious security stuff appeared, and servlets now need to be given specific permission to obtain their own parameter lists, write temporary files, blow their nose, and perform other seemingly normal functions. Gaah!

My Thursday, while the aptly-named finagler was dealing with the servlet and database components of the system, was mostly spent persuading start-stop-daemon to start and stop Xvfb (the virtual X server that Java code needs in order to do graphics of any kind) (easy) and my little queue-polling app, written in Perl (almost impossible -- I never did get it to actually stop). Oh, and testing, making sure it all boots, and writing the setup documentation.

I also installed Webmin to make things easier on JB, who isn't much of a Linux geek yet. After verifying that it could, in fact, be used to configure printing (a critical function of the system) and networking, I finally went home at about 10pm on Thursday.

Yesterday I finished off the documentation (which I put in the server admin's public_html directory -- seemed like the right place) and printed a couple of copies. Total of about a minute from logging into Webmin to configure the printer, to printing the docs: easy. I don't use Webmin myself because the one time I tried it, it blew away all of the comments (including my working notes) in the config files it touched. Fine if you're going to stick with Webmin and never look at, or try to understand, the config files. Disastrous otherwise.

Finally, about 3pm, I reset the network parameters for Japan, shut down, and put the system back in its box. The original plan had been for the folks on the Japan side to buy an identical machine so that JB could just carry a disk. Turned out they didn't have the budget for it, so JB gets to lug the whole darned thing with him. While JB was packing, I started sucking down a Debian mirror so that we'd be able to continue installing on the system without having to have direct Internet access -- we get to stay on the internal WAN.

In other news, version 3.4 of Knoppix is finally out. I've just burned it and will be checking it out later today.

Comments

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

If you're in a filky mood, here are the lyrics to Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell

http://www.lyricsdepot.com/black-sabbath/heaven-hell.html

[mdlbear]

I'm not familiar with it, and Debian doesn't scan (though it rhymes almost well enough). I'll keep it in mind, though.