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.

I had recently updated Samba from v3.3 to v3.4 using yum, assuming it to be a bug-free release which wouldn’t break anything.  How wrong I was.  From v3.4, Samba has been changed to use a different authentication mechanism by default.  It used to use smbpasswd up to v3.3, but now uses tdbsam.

Ok, no problem really – until the upgrade from v3.3 to v3.4 changes your smb.conf without leaving an smb.conf.backup or something similar sitting next to it.  So without knowing it, your Samba installation now uses tdbsam.  Now, the problem with this is that there is a known bug whereby Windows clients become unable to authenticate and connect.

It was disappointing to have to find this out the hard way – by which I mean trawling around the web.  But still, it should be easy enough to edit smb.conf and change the authentication back to smbpasswd, right?  Wrong, because it seems the upgrade deleted the file containing the smbpasswd credentials (/var/lib/samba/private/smbpasswd).

Redhat’s Bugzilla entry explains how to convert smbpasswd account credentials to tdbsam format, so presumably you can do the reverse.  Well, technically you can – but only if the tdbsam credentials file (/var/lib/samba/private/passdb.tdb) isn’t empty!  That’s right, the upgrade failed (or didn’t even try) to convert the smbpasswd account credentials to the tdb format.

The solution is to run smbpasswd -a username for every Samba account you lost.  I’m glad I only had two.

This is why I think Linux is a long long way from being ready to take over the world.  I don’t think the Linux community appreciates how much help the average desktop user needs when they encounter problems.  This is demonstrated by the fact that Linux gives you no help at all; even the noddy ‘How do I…’ help topics in Windows destroy the assistance Linux offers.

From the very start, Linux makes it very clear you’re on your own.

While I admit that the change to Samba was publicised in the Samba release notes, I simply do not have the time to read through the release notes of, and perform impact analysis upon, every update I install.  I want to be confident that each update is the best thing for my system – much like Windows Update.

For now, I will stick with the majority of users, and keep current with Windows updates for the advantage of not having to enter the root user’s password whenever I want to do something.

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.

So I went about reformatting the pages. There are only half a dozen of them, and only one or two are of any considerable size – but this was enough to find exactly how annoying the WordPress WYSIWYG editor can be. I ended up with inconsistent newlines (although the HTML was consistent), weird closing tags that didn’t match anything else in the document, and random behaviour whereby the editor would say something along the lines of “hey, I can’t figure out exactly what you’re trying to do, so why don’t I double-space half of this here single-spaced text, indent the whole document from this point onwards, and completely unformat all your headings?”

There’s a little feature on the WordPress.org website called Kvetch!, which allows users to anonymously vent their annoyance at WordPress’s quirks and bugs. I had seen that several people don’t like the built-in HTML editor that WordPress has, but I myself had only ever needed to write a few paragraphs and make a couple of words bold, nothing more – and for this it is fine adequate.

But for decent formatting capabilities, the built-in editor just doesn’t cut it. It is what I have decided to call a WYSINWYWBYWJHTGWI editor. Yes, a What-You-See-Is-Not-What-You-Want-But-You-Will-Just-Have-To-Go-With-It editor. I’m going to register that as a trademark so that the WordPress people can’t thieve it from me when they release their next iteration.

So, there was else nothing for it. I cracked open Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, and used that as my editor to reformat everything. I didn’t use the WYSIWYG designer, I just wanted something that would give me syntax colouring.

I was fully prepared to go so far as to use notepad – but I think that would have been a little too hardcore for my liking.

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.

I also decided I should try out Windows Vista. It looks great, it performs brilliantly, and, again, it’s the way forward.

Those two decisions obviously weren’t risky enough, because I threw in a third; to run the 64-bit version of Vista.

As if Vista’s lack of maturity alone wasn’t enough–with prolific reports of hardware manufacturers failing to release stable Vista drivers in time–I had added that extra 64-bit dimension to the situation. Maybe I was hoping manufacturers hadn’t released Vista drivers because they were concentrating on the 64-bit versions of the Vista drivers…

Anyway, Vista 64-bit is a bitch. It’s soooo beautiful, but… such a bitch.

Vista 64-bit will sporadically crash/fail to boot with 4GB of memory installed. The biggest hardware advantage of a 64-bit system is that it can use more than 4GB or memory. How could Microsoft possibly overlook this bug? It can’t possibly be down to lack of testing, surely? Fortunately Microsoft knowledgebase article 929777 fixes it. Ironically the problem occurs with 32- and 64-bit versions of Vista.

Then, of course, MSI decided not to develop 64-bit drivers for my motherboard; specifically, for the on-board audio. The motherboard supports a 64-bit processor. I know this, because it’s doing so right now. Clearly, it being a 64-bit motherboard, and this being the age of the 64-bit processor, there is no reason why MSI should even contemplate the laughable notion of developing 64-bit drivers.

And then the icing on the cake: Office 2007. Considering it costs more than an office suite should, I was disappointed to learn that several Office 2007 features aren’t available on a 64-bit operating system. Really obscure things are missing, like the Send to OneNote print driver, the Office Clean-up wizard, and Internet Fax. Not a catastrophe, but bloody annoying.

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…