The network was down here at work for about half an hour. It’s amazing how connected I have to be in order to do my job. Everything I do here entails connecting to some external system, getting data, formatting it and then spitting it out somewhere else. When the connection is broken, there’s nothing to do but sit and wait.
Before the network went down, I installed Webmin on the uberBox (Dual-Xeon Linux Monster). I have to say that I’m extremely impressed with its features and ease-of-use. It was a cinch to install (rpm –install webmin*.rpm), run and connect to. The best part is the MySQL admin tool, because MySQL pretty much sucks when it comes to providing any usable admin interface. With MySQL up and running, a db created and users set up, my pal Al can go create cool Perl-based calendars and stuff without having to use AOLserver’s Tcl interface that we have set up for Postgres (he don’t like Tcl so much).
Yes, this is a geeky ramble, but what else am I going to do? The network’s down and I’m stuck here staring at code that has nothing to do.
While we wait, let’s talk about RedHat 8, shall we? Guys, what happened? RedHat 7.3 was the coolest, most stable Linux distro I’d ever had the pleasure to use (yes, even more stable than when I had YellowDog on my Powerbook. I had high hopes for 8.0. I’d heard great things from beta testers and the press. As soon as it was released, I hopped on an FTP mirror, downloaded and burned it and installed it. The installation went fine. Booting up went fine, and then the problems began. While it certainly is pretty, it’s really unstable for me. Even simple commands like ls take an inordinate amount of time on directories that don’t have a lot of files in them. The telnet server didn’t come pre-installed. There were other things missing that I can’t remember now. KDE won’t even start up. GNOME works, but it’s almost too pretty. It won’t work correctly when I choose the mouse I actually have (not a weird one either, a regular old PS/2 Intellimouse), and I had to switch back to the regular 2-button profile. No scroll wheel!! How will I get anything done?!!
Ok, enough of that. I apologize for this post. It would have been about the election, but I’m still too angry about all of it to talk about it here.