Patrick’s Rants

It is day two or three in my firewall saga. It all started with a seemingly minor update. I ran swaret on the newer laptop. It was a little out of date. The firewall was too. I decided to install the updates and ended up with problems related to the kernel version… both machines ended up throwing “kernel too old” errors. This normally would have been a simple fix. I would just grab my Slackware CDs and reinstall some older software to get it working again and then upgrade the kernel. In the process I determined that most of my install CDs were bad; they randomly failed. I’m guessing that the CD burner at the office has been bad for longer than I thought¹. Remember children always test your burned CDs. It’s a pain to do, I know. But it saves finding out that the last four versions are crapped out in some form or another - especially when it’s emergency recovery time.

Actually on day one I managed to bring the firewall back into use; downgrading the one package that ended up broken - bash. It was a simple fix really. I booted using the install disk, mounted all the partitions under /mnt and then mounted /cdrom so I could get to the packages. Simply running:
installpkg -root /mnt bash

I was able to get bash where it belonged. I then rebooted and proceeded to break it again. It now sits there quietly, a sad shell of its former glory².

The laptop… I ended up reinstalling on the laptop. Since I had all the mp3s on it I carefully deleted everything except for the mp3 directory and /usr/local/bin - the location of my script that I spent so much time getting “right”. I installed the very base system from my 10.0 CD and then slowly upgraded through version 10.2 using swaret. It’s waiting for me to get back to it to finish the upgrades, the prompt showing me a list of files that I’m not ready to test.

Not being able to get the firewall completely running I had to reset the IP address on my regular computer - and reboot - and delete the second copy that Windows thinks that I need for my network card - and reboot again. How can you have a dynamic address and a static address on the same network card on Windows 98? On Linux-based systems it’s just an alias, but I didn’t think *doze had this “capability”.

So if fighting this process doesn’t sound masochistic enough, I decided that I needed to get my CD burner - which has been sitting quietly in an unused computer - working again. I had a small Intel based computer board in a case just waiting for the day that I get around to putting Asterisk on it. I hauled the Intel box over to my desk to get setup. I first decided to see if it would even power up any more. I plugged in the power cable and pushed the button. Nothing. I know this box worked before. I try it again and then again. Still nothing. An led glows on the mother board so I know that it’s getting some power. I pulled out my voltmeter to see if there is any juice coming into the power connectors and find nothing on the wires I test.

In frustration I start pulling all the workable drives out of the box - if it doesn’t work, I’m just going to junk it. There I was sitting with the drives and cables scattered around me and I’m looking at the motherboard. A thought occurs to me - something I heard a long time ago. Could it be that the tiny button battery is dead? No. That would be too simple and I would feel foolish for getting this machine ready for the recycle drop off. I pop out the nickel sized battery and check it. No volts. It’s supposed to have 3. Hmm…. I grab a battery from another motherboard (oh yeah, nothing like saving a dozen or so on the shelf) and check it. It has some juice, but really low. I popped it into the empty slot and pushed the power button. The danged thing started beeping at me to let me know that I had removed the RAM. So much for dumping this thing…

I decided to grab my 160g hard drive to see if this machine would boot to it. No luck. It didn’t even see it³. I grabbed a 30g hard drive that I had in an old machine and popped that it. After installing two hard drives, adding the Promise IDE card for the large drive, reinstalling the floppy and CDRom drive and popping in the CD-RW drive it was time to test. This old drive had RedHat installed on it once upon a time. I powered up, the Promise card told me it couldn’t find the hard drive. I moved the cable around, made sure the hard drive had power. Still nothing. I removed the jumper that I installed. Now it could see it.

The old RedHat splash screen popped up, but I was unable to get any of the kernels to run. The box would just reboot without going past the screen.

Yuck.

I then installed an old copy of Debian. It worked. It still needs a bunch more work as far as which packages I have installed, but I’m up-to-date on the kernel, I can see the second hard drive (some additional kernel modules necessary for the promise card) and only have one minor glitch when it comes to loading the module for the network card…

I’m going to fix the firewall by loading the packages on the Debian machine and then do an NFS install. I’ll let you know how that goes. I’ll probably start burning CDs again real soon.

1. The burning laser seems to be off. Using the same drive to read what was written works just fine. Trying to read it on another machine, or the other drive, leads to failure.
2. Yup, still broken.
3. That could have been the jumper