Switching to MediaOne

[richb at PIONEER.CI.NET (Rich Braun)]

Well, I took the advice of folks here who asserted that my configuration
was too old.  A couple of folks suggested SuSE.

So I went out and bought a new $100 hard drive and a $30 copy of SuSE 6.4.
I went to one of my Windoze boxes, pulled out its hard drive temporarily,
and popped in the new drive figuring this'll be a quick install.

Well, about 30 seconds into the install, the CDROM's drive light went on
solid and nothing else happened.  From that point on, the drive wouldn't
boot; I put the Windoze hard drive back in and confirmed that, sure enough,
I'd managed to roach the CDROM at 10am on a Sunday.  For those who want
to know where one can buy a CDROM drive at 10am on a Sunday here in greater
Boston, the answer is OfficeMax which opens at 10am.  (PCs for Everyone
is closed Sundays; all the other stores open at noon.)

Returning to my configuration task, I loaded up the system, got it to
talk to MediaOne, and then tried putting in a second Ethernet NIC.
That led to the first hour of hair-pulling: the yast2 config tool in
SuSE completely munged the rc startup files and I was forced to
hand-edit and to read the various bizarre scripts which have evolved
since the last time I dealt with Linux startup files.  Gotta offer a
criticism here: this stuff is headed down a very wrong path.  The
Linux user community could have come up with a nice modular way of
loading and configuring device drivers and network daemons, but
instead it's gone down the path of all the various failed commercial
Unix config tools.  This stuff is arcane and buggy, just like
Microsoft.  Worse yet, it's not centrally managed like the kernel
itself: a dozen different variants have emerged and are threatening to
kill each other off just like the horrid SCO and HP and Digital Unix
cruft.

Anyway, I hand-edited things to the point where it comes up the way the
SuSE startup script designers meant them to, with both Ethernet NIC's
coming up and playing nice with MediaOne (i.e. I've got a proper DHCP
client talking to the net).

Next up was downloading ssh from Finland so I can start copying things
off my old box (which I left on the RCN connection at the old house until
I get this mess sorted out--I don't want my email shut down for however
many days it'll take to stabilize).

Then I've figured out that the IP masquerade function aka NAT is completely
different in 2.2 vs. 2.0 kernels.

In order to stabilize, I'll need to download and configure quite a few
things I've taken for granted:  latest-greatest sendmail (is there a personal
SMTP mechanism which is more secure than sendmail?  I oughtta scrap
sendmail if I can), my DNS zones, my xntpd config, my LAN's dhcp server,
and some monitoring scripts.

Once I get all that working, then I gotta move the newly-configured hard
drive to my old Linux box and determine whether the box itself has to be
thrown out and started over (which strikes me as fairly likely, after I've
managed to get the software configured on a slightly-newer machine).

It's tough to find time to do all this when in the midst of
moving/unpacking, and starting a new job.  But thanks for giving me the
push to tackle a new Linux distro.

-rich
P.S.  To Tom Metro, who asked if the old Pentium is the original
pioneer.ci.net.  No, it's the personal Linux workstation I bought
after deciding to sell Pioneer to Verio toward the tail end of 1996.
Pioneer.ci.net, the production box, was always a 486.  And yes, I do
still have that 486--I powered it up a couple months ago just to see
if it still works, and it does (I had forgotten the root pw so I had
to hack my way in ;-).  In the summer of 1997, when I was in the
process of leaving Verio, I had them buy uu2.pn.com (a beefy
rack-mount Pentium) and install it at the colo facility as a permanent
replacement for running UUCP.  They ran it until fall 1999 when not
enough UUCP revenues came in to justify moving the box and its phone
lines to a new site under construction.  I *think* Shore.Net still has
a handful of UUCP customers; it's probably the last remaining pocket
of commercial UUCP in these parts.
-
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