[CLUE-Tech] upgrading rpm (continued and resolution)

[Carl Schelin]

--- Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 21:10:44 -0800 (PST), Carl
> Schelin
> <co_bofh at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > (another delay; fscking netgear has failed and I have
> > to recable. second FPOS netgear to fail out of two. no
> > more netgears for me.)
> 
> Interesting. I've always gotten good results with netgear.

They work for a pretty long while but they eventually give up the ghost.

The first netgear failed for no reason. Never got power back.

I've been having problems with the WGR614 since back in May or so. I have
a Mac Powerbook G4 and used the netgear (wireless) with no problem. One
day though I decided I wanted to turn off the SSID, not possible with the
614 at its current firmware so I upgraded (I seem to have problems with
upgrades ;-) and from that point on, the mac can't stay connected to the
netgear for more than a few minutes before killing the WAP. I finally gave
up dicking around with upgrades and bought an Apple Extreme
(printer/music/wap) which fixed the mac problem (I know, I know; throwing
money at it. The problem was no answers from Netgear or dlsreports about
my problem, so...). The windows boxes could still talk to the netgear so
the problem was solved. Briefly. Not even a week later, the netgear lost
its mind. Lights were on but no one was home. I powered it down and back
up and have just an orange power light after a brief flash of green across
the board. A power down and a reset doesn't fix it so it's sitting to the
side and the old linksys is back in its place. I'm considering a linksys
wireless router since the apple extreme can be a repeater to it.

> 
> [ rest of tale of woe snipped ]
> 
> Hey man, I really sympathize. I had similar problems with RPM-based
> systems years ago, and I switched never to look back.

This is the first time I've had a problem like this which is what makes is
so frustrating. On the old box I'd just run startx and use the draktools
to upgrade and then shutdown X, no problems. This time I decided not to
install the extra stuff and keep the box minimally installed (I'm a
solaris admin by trade and used to not running GUI's on my servers).

> 
> I recommend run-not-walk to debian unstable (if you prefer a binary
> distro) or gentoo (if you can deal with source-based). I've heard
> nothing but goodness from people who use debian with apt-get (or
> other) on debian, and I can attest to years of successful updates with
> gentoo. There are, of course, several ways to get going with debian.

I played with several distros after I decided to shift from Slackware 6 or
7 years ago and went through debian, openbsd, freebsd and red hat. Red Hat
worked pretty well for a couple of years but then the system stopped
working because @Home was bought by Comcast and they went to a /28 mask.
The ancient 3Com cards or the drivers didn't support CIDR. I tried a
couple of things and finally replaced the whole thing with a Mandrake 7
installation. I'd been using it for my work system after Norton AV
destroyed my inbox and it seemed to work pretty well at finding the odd
hardware I had kicking around the house (which was my main problem with
the other distros).

Now the system is degrading, old hardware (Pentium Pro 233 on a CompUSA
mobo with 128 megs of ram) and kernel failures which halt the system
causing lost files. I have it in morning reboot mode since it was
happening at 4:30 or so every couple of mornings and that seems to be
holding up. I'm also getting Carrier errors on the internal interface.
I've swapped cards with the new machine and nothing changed. I changed
cables since I had to have a crossover cable for the linksys and am still
getting errors.

eth1
 Link encap:Ethernet    HWaddr 00:0C:41:24:5B:06
 inet addr: 192.168.2.1  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
 RX packets:30570 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
 TX packets:0 errors:42868 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:83687
 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
 RX bytes:3990609 (3.8 Mb)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
 Interrupt:9 Base address:0xf400

I have my old game system, pentium III 600b with 792 megs of ram and a
couple of raided seagate 80 gig drives (see earlier e-mail about dicking
around with software raid). I've installed mandrake and will install the
main software manually; bind, postfix, apache, qpopper, snort and mysql so
far.

Basically I've used RPM type systems for years and am comfortable with
them. I'm considering cleaning up the old linux box and rebuilding with
bsd again, just to play around with it. Maybe I'll check out debian, suse
or even slackware since it's been a while (maybe even Knoppix).

> 
> Best of luck.

Thanks

> 
> -- 
>  Collins

Carl


		
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