Patrick’s Rants

Over the weekend I decided that it was time to upgrade software on the office firewall. Not a big deal, I upgrade software on the firewall once every two weeks, sometimes every week. This time, the kernel was part of the upgrade and when entered the command to reboot it never came back up. Since I wasn’t at the office while attempting the upgrade, I could no longer log in. I was forced to drive to the office, plug in a monitor and a keyboard (this thing normally just runs) and see what was what. As it turns out, the machine didn’t like the new kernel for some reason and it was hung on the login screen.

No problem, I’ll just whip out my Knoppix CD and fix it. Dang! This machine doesn’t have an option to boot from CD. Ok, Tom’s Root Boot disk to the rescue! That’s when I learned that Tom’s doesn’t support Resiserfs and I couldn’t get the hard drive mounted so that it could be fixed. I tried various combinations, tried following the error messages on the screen to get into the system to no avail. I was thouroughly frustrated. (I never did get a boot disk to work properly with this machine)

I grabbed the firewall box and box that I had sitting there that was going to be the Asterix PBX server. I lugged both of those home and began (re)installing Slackware on the soon-to-be new firewall machine. I was reinstalling so that I could have a “regular” filesystem, one that can be read by Tom’s or any other really tiny floppy based recovery disk the next time I have a problem like this. So install the OS, copy some configuration files from the other hard drive (that I could now read from the new machine) and get ready to move the network cards to the new machine - so that I could boot from the CD Rom drive - and, oh shit! The newer machine only has PCI slots, the older machine only has ISA slots. Those NICs aren’t gonna move. So I removed the hard drive from the new machine to the old machine. Oh look, it boots up.

It’s a good thing I didn’t do what I wanted to do to that poor old box. I was going to “boot it” across the alley, probably a few times. And when I was done with that I was going to throw it into the dumpster from as far away as I could - and if I missed, I was going to try again. I know what you’re thinking, that poor hunk of encased-steel (yeah, it’s that old) IBM never did anything to you, and what about environmentally friendly disposal of the components? I realize that machine didn’t cause my problems, I did. But it’s just not as satisfying to take that old box over to the recycle center. Really.