March 31, 2008

• My virgin expirence with Debian was bloody

  Acquiring a box
  So I bought a new box from a friend of mine, Reggie. I helped him build a box like a year/year and a half ago. (Actually, I just told him what went where and made him do all the work.) For whatever reason he became obsessed with water-cooling and decided he wanted Big Water.

  I got a phone call one day that one of the hoses leaked onto the motherboard around the processor and so shorted damn near everything in the box out. Reggie went to CompUSA and had them build another box.

  CUT TO: Three weeks ago. Reggie called to check up on me and told me that he was delivering for Edible Arrangements on Saturday for $15/hr in addition to his Monday-Friday accounting job as well as working a couple of nights a week for Domihoes. He then said (and I quote) “I woke up this morning and something was wrong with my computer. I think it got a virus, so I just said ‘fuck it’ and went to Walmart and bought another one. I’ll let you have this one for $125.”

  Now for those of you who really know me, you know I HATE second-hand boxes, but I knew the owner and thought I knew the specs. I thought it was 2 GB of DDR2 and a dual-core chip of some kind. It turned out to be 6800+ 64bit AMD chip with 1 GB of DDR1, but hell, it was a decent box for a steal and I know that I can put at least another GB in, if not max out the no-name off-brand mobo. I do know that the mobo has an ATI Radeon Express chipset/controller and given the fact that the 32-bit P4 MSI board I had could take 4 GB, so I should be able to put at least that much in this board.

  Assembling the parts
  So I went home for Easter and brought back my old 15″ CRT that came with the Gateway I purchased in ’98. I used the black $12 keyboard that I originally purchased for Black Widow. (I forgot how well it types. Too bad it’s a PS/2 and I no longer require a keyboard on deepblue).

  I chose to install Debian because it is one of the platforms that we support at work for our product, I had never worked with Debian (I had worked with Ubuntu which forked off of Debian) and I am wanting to gain more experience with multiple operating systems in the hopes of one day becoming a highly skilled, highly paid SysAdmin.

  

  Installation isn’t a snap
  As I had a 64bit AMD chip, I decided to go with that architecture’s build. Thrice I ran the installer, and thrice it chocked at 78% when it was “writing language to drive”, so I opted for the i386 build which installed like a champ.

  I then wanted to set a static IP address for both miniMax0r and deepblue, Doing so on miniMax0r was uneventful, but no matter what I did on deepblue, it didn’t want to read from the conf file. Actually, it must have been reading at least something out of the file, because the box would loose its connection to the Internet, but ifconfg would report the old DHCP IP address, not the new, static one despite having restarted the networking service and bringing the interface up and down. After struggling with this for a couple of hours, I decided to try resetting the box, at which point, ifconfig reported the static IP and the box could connect to the internet. If anyone out there thinks they know what was going on, please enlighten me.

  If I only knew more about DNS and Networking
  What I want to be able to do is instead of having to specify a port on the existing domain and have to forward that through the router, I want to be able to go

  ssh deepblue.professortom.net

  or

  ssh max0r.professortom.net

  without just aliasing the IP and having to forward the ports explicitly. Having to do so makes it pointless to have a C-name pointing back to the address and makes me mad. Any thoughts on this will be greatly appreciated.

  I don’t want to pay for the electricity to run this box as with the fans and lights I think it will easily consume 3 times the energy that miniMax0r consumes, but it will be nice having my own version of the company’s product running on a box that I maintain so that I have a better understanding of how things work. This was going to be my workaround for the lack of a server in techsupport (we have to have something we can test on after all) but a box came into work the other day that is supposed to be the new server whenever someone has a chance to get around to installing it.

  • 10:25 am
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