Category: Rant

Why did I choose Ubuntu again?

When installing this new machine, I picked Ubuntu as the Linux distro, because the people in LUGOR are all full of praise for it. But after the debacle with trying to get X working (which was solved by discovered a boot time option “nodcc”), I have been having my doubts. And now I’ve discovered a couple of other things to hate about it.

  • Every time I rebooted, it reset my /etc/resolv.conf to a stupid default. Eventually I traced this down to a couple of stupid ppp scripts that were referenced in /etc/rcS.d on shutdown for some reason, even though I’m not using ppp. One of those scripts included the utterly stupid line if [ -n "$PROVIDER " ] – the space after the PROVIDER ensures that the test will never be false. Good one, guys.
  • So I tried to remove ppp and pppconfig, only to find that they’re both required components of ubuntu-base. Why the hell would they do that?

I’m starting to wish I’d stuck with Debian.

And every day you’re in this place you’re two days nearer death

One of the “joys” of working in a large, old, poorly maintained and shrinking chemical plant is the constant barrage of dangerous chemical smells. I used to walk from the parking lot to the entrance under a pipe bridge that carried a bunch of pipes, one of which was labelled “Ketone”. There was often a strong smell of aromatic hydrocarbons under that bridge.

Today, just after I’d posted my previous posting, three company firemen were standing in front of my cube, wearing breathing tanks on their backs (but thankfully not using them). One of my co-workers came by and said he’d reported a nasty smell and something dripping onto his desk from the ceiling above, and they’d come out.

Ten Ways to get fired and/or arrested at work

You know those silly corporate IT security rules? The ones that they say are there to prevent you from accidentally turning your company computer into a spam bot or exposing company data to thieves or infesting the corporate network with viruses? Well, since that’s just gobbledygook to you, obviously you can subvert those rules with impunity, right?

Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You – WSJ.com

I’ve got an idea – try all 10 of those ideas and see how long you keep your job. If you’re lucky, you won’t end up in jail for it, but good luck getting another job that involves a computer more sophisticated than a McDonalds cash register.

Can I just say right now how much I hate…

…the Airport Utility (AU) that comes with the Airport Express (AE) base station.

First annoyance is that the damn AE reboots every damn time you change the slightest little parameter. You want to add a new printer? Reboot. Add Windows networking to the shared disk drives? Reboot.

Second annoyance is that the router has to have the .1 address. Too bad I was using 192.168.1.1 for my Linux box, and 192.168.1.254 for the router before. So I had to renumber every reference to my Linux box everywhere on the LAN.

So I got around that crap. The shared printers and disk were working great. But then Vicki noticed that the TiVos weren’t connecting to the network any more. Oh yeah, new SSID. I guess I’d better reconfigure them. That’s when the real fun began.

Real fun number 1: TiVo wouldn’t connect to the new network, because the new network uses WPA instead of WEP. Ok, fine, I thought, I’d convert the AE to WEP.

Real fun number 2: AU will only accept WEP passwords as 13 alphanumeric characters. The usual Apple way of entering a hex string WEP password, by putting a $ at the front, doesn’t work.

Real fun number 3: After rebooting, the Airport Utility says the AE is using WEP, but everything that attempts to connect to it (my laptop and the Tivo) says that it’s still using WPA.

Real fun number 4: Every couple of reboots, the AU says it can’t connect to the AE, and you have to exit it and re-enter.

Real fun number 5: I tried turning off the security entirely. After yet another reboot, the AE refuses to come back up. I power cycled it, and it has a continuously flashing yellow light on the front, which normally indicates an error of some sort. AU confirms that the “error” is the lack of security. That’s fucking annoying.

Real fun number 6: With security turned off, the TiVo says that it can’t find a DHCP server. Since it had no trouble finding the DHCP server before, I assume that’s the AE’s fault.

At this point, I said “fuck it, this sucks”, and switched off the AE and put the Linksys back. The AE is going to go off to the Genius Bar to see if there is some secret way to get it to do WEP as well as a router that costs 1/5th as much does.

If that doesn’t work, I have a plan B: put the AE in pass through mode, and put it, the printers and the disk in the library. That might even improve the reception in the kitchen.