[clue-tech] Installfest hot wash.

[David L. Anselmi]

A hot wash is (in the military) an after-action report or meeting.  Sort
of a debrief on just concluded operations.  So here it is for 
yesterday's 'fest.

Last time I did this I sent it to CLUE-admin[1]--I don't think it
belongs here (generally) and I don't subscribe to -talk.  But I was
encouraged to share with a wider audience so here it is.  As it happens
there are some -tech things to say but if anyone objects to seeing my
ramblings I'll gladly refrain in the future.  I guess the real risk is
that a long, off-topic thread will start.  But they say you only live
once... ;-)

Thanks to Joanne Yamaguchi for arranging the space at DeVry, and the
girl in the office that I bothered for the Pizza Hut number.  DeVry
closes earlier now so we wrapped up about 3:00 but they were very nice
about not rushing us.

Thanks also to everyone who asked questions, answered them, and shared
their experiences.  I won't single out Collins and Hani because then I'd
be leaving out Zach, Denis, David, and several others as well.

We had over 20 people there (21 by my count but I might have missed 
some).  Most stayed the whole day.  We were able to order pizza so no 
one went hungry but the free drinks at Batky-Howell were missed.  I had 
something else to do in the evening so I didn't ask anyone to go to 
dinner this time.  Since we ended early that wasn't as convenient as 
last time.

Seemed like most people were installing new or upgraded distros and we 
had a couple of people who were new to Linux and eager to learn.  We 
also had a few problems that required some digging, and not enough 
people to dig (I try to keep an eye on everyone so I usually can't get 
sucked into something that takes too long--sorry if that made anyone 
feel unimportant).

Let's see...  I heard that sound broke between FC4 and FC5.  But I don't 
pay that much attention to sound or Fedora so I didn't have an easy answer.

We did an FC6 install but couldn't find a way to get yum to install 
madwifi (that was late in the day and we had no yum wizard handy--I 
don't think it's that hard a problem).

Getting grub to boot an external hard drive from a USB-2 card in a USB-1 
motherboard was tricky too.  I'm not sure what hardware support grub 
needs to do that (booting grub was OK, it was on a different drive).

There was a "dead" box there that might have been easy to fix, but no 
time to look at it.

Just like last time, a live CD with Gnome/KDE seems to be too much for a 
P-II to handle.  Collins mentioned[2] that the Ubuntu live CD doesn't 
have all the partition resizing tools available so it's still a good 
idea to carry Knoppix.  (Etherboot and the SUSE net-install require you 
to know what your NIC is so something that can detect it for you is nice 
to have.)

Saw a laptop that was booting Mepis off an external drive.  Neat way 
around the company rule to to muck with the Windows install.  It seemed 
to have a SATA drive, since its internal drive showed up as SCSI.  I 
haven't seen that before.

Everyone seemed to find the CDs they needed without me burning any. 
There was one download of FC6 from my box and one FC6 net install 
(booting via the Etherboot rom-o-matic).  Last time we had SUSE, *buntu, 
and Smoothwall net installs so adding FC was a nice step forward (had to 
use NFS to work around their installer bug[3]).  So my Christmas project 
is to add Debian to the list.  I also need to put together better 
net-boot screens and some kind of tutorial so it's more obvious to 
everyone what's available and how to get it.

The network turned out to be great for a boot server--no DHCP so running 
our own was easy (and made the network config easier for everyone since 
most people run DHCP at home--maybe I should figure out zeroconf too). 
There were some dead/flaky network drops though so watch for that next 
time (and maybe get the tech guy to show us enough to fix those for 
him).  Wifi (and even Ricochet) worked as well.

I didn't bring a CD burner but all the DeVry boxes had them.  It'd be 
handy to have Knoppix on a thumb drive to be able to use those.  I 
wonder if there's a "Knoppix - Gui" down in the 128-256MB range.

Well, there it is.  The bottom line for those who weren't there: if you 
know something we could have used your help.  If you wanted to know 
something, we probably could have helped you.  So plan on coming next 
time--I'm shooting for January down south and I'll announce the date 
when we know it.

Dave

  1. http://www.cluedenver.org/pipermail/clue-admin/2006-August/000348.html
  2.
http://www.cluedenver.org/pipermail/clue-tech/2006-November/002401.html
  3.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=215072