nikrivers.com

There are plenty of people around who will happily slate Microsoft (sorry, that should be Micro$oft), Windoze, and Internet Exploder.  The majority of these people will, unprompted, extoll the virtues of Linux.

I won’t lie, I like Microsoft.  I think Windows is the best all-round family of operating systems available.  And I use Internet Explorer as my default browser, even though I have Firefox and Chrome installed.

But I also run a Linux server.  It is a modest beast.  It has a Sempron processor, three hard disks around 200-500GB each, and about 1GB of RAM.  It doesn’t need much, even though it acts as a mail server, a web server, and a DNS and network file server for my home LAN.  It runs Fedora 11, which is actually quite nice.

I started using Linux with no experience, and with the help of some patience, a few good Internet resources, and good old intuition, I pretty much know what I’m doing.

About a week ago, my Internet connection started to die sporadically, at unpredictable intervals, for no apparent reason.  I traced the lack of connectivity down to the DNS server not responding to requests, and this led me to realise that the Linux box would not respond to any kind of request at all: SSH, HTTP, or even ping.

So imagine my surprise, when after a lot of investigation (and I really do mean a LOT of investigation) it turned out to be Samba, the service which handles network file shares.

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I’ve never really had any cause to write large posts using Wordpress, except for my NSLU2 articles – and even then the built-in WYSIWYG editor was good enough, albeit a little clunky and requiring gentle persuasion every so often.

But after changing blog themes the other day, I realised the NSLU2 pages were actually quite dependent on the underlying CSS – and for some themes, this means that they looked rubbish.

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My new PC has been giving me a hard time recently. And it’s my own fault.

When I built it, I decided it should have a 64-bit processor. Of course, that’s 32 bits more than anyone actually needs at the moment, but it’s the way forward. Allegedly.

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No matter how appreciated it might be, or how necessary it may seem, working on a Saturday is never a good idea. For a start, you never get a Saturday back in return; if you work Monday to Friday, you can only get one of those days given back to you.

Plus, of course, there’s the fact that you can almost never take the very next working day in lieu. The reason for my working on Saturday was to make sure we were ready for a delivery on Monday. So there was no chance of taking Monday off. As it happens, the delivery has been rescheduled for today, so along with there having been no need to work on Saturday (but that’s another story), it’s four days later and I still haven’t got my day back.

And due to the nature of deliveries to clients, there’s always something small to fix or tweak – and our delivery being at the end of play results in those fixes or tweaks being made the day after: tomorrow.

So it will be Friday at the earliest before I get my day back. Assuming the delivery isn’t rescheduled again.

And then I have to haggle with project managers, whose Microsoft Project plans (or, more accurately, Microsoft Excel plans) are meticulously calculated and set out, but don’t make any allowance for resources having an unexpected day off, or being ill, or being hit by a bus.

So in all likelihood, this Saturday I will be a week behind everyone else…