A September in Computer Hell
Oh yeah. It’s time for a rant. A very nerdy rant, yes, but a rant.
September was apparently Computer Hell month for me. And oh man, was it a warm one.
OK. Let’s start out with a little recap. Right near the beginning of the month, the integrated video card on one of my users’ desktop machine flaked out. It started up normally, except that instead of displaying anything normal on the screen, it displayed a lovely shade of screwdriver-and-nachos-puke orange. Oh yeah, good stuff. Fortunately, Purdue purchasing policy dictates a 3-year warranty, so I called up dell and got them to send a tech out to swap the motherboard for a new one, meanwhile I swapped in a less-used machine. Lost time: half a day for her, half an hour on the phone for me. Not too bad.
Next, there was the GCC-4.1 stabilization. Oh, those were fun times. Figuring that one out, getting shit rebuilt and functional again, that was a lot of fun. Yes, that was the word, fun. I’ve already covered that one enough though.
Next, I had disk flakeouts on the home fileserver, culminating in a head crash that lost me some replaceable data and some time dealing with it. I had a previous disk in the fileserver die back in May or so that lost some data, and I had swapped in a noisy WD drive that had already seen 2-3 years of continuous uptime, so having that disk fail wasn’t too bad, but was still pretty annoying.
The same week, I had a win2k3 box at work hose itself. Drove home the point about backups, if that had been the sharepoint server I’d have been slightly more boned. It was just the windows install, but since I was planning on retasking the machine anyway, I took the opportunity to do a clean install, and then to retask it. Win2k3 install … more lost time, but it’s nice having a clean system. Also prompted me to make a couple instance-backups of the database and system states and configs, and set up one of the old dell-boxen I got from itap as a backup domain controller to do ntfrs stuff. So the net result of that was a definite positive. I also learned from a bit of sharepoint-server flakeout action that it’d be in my best interest to reboot every win2k3 box in the lab at least once a month, whether it needs it or not. Apparently they’re not as reliable as winxp at installing auto-updates and rebooting themselves … I had a winlogon process on one of them that spooled out to the whole available ram, causing some slowdown. What can ya do there though?
At the same time, some other parts of compiz started to flake out, and my XGL setup at work failed in unsightly ways. So I did a fresh install of gentoo on the workstation, just to get things back to a stable, functional setup.
Anyway, then back at home, after a routine-feeling windows update, my windows install on my desktop nuked itself. I guess I’ve been kind of hard on it, seeing how many times I’ve grown and shrunk the partition to accommodate different linux tests and such, so it was probably due for a clean install anyway. But that was annoying, especially since it was less than a week after the headcrash on the fileserver and reinstalling my work workstation. That’d be 4 OS installs in a week. But actually 5 or 6, ’cause I also reinstalled the OS on the old drive in my coworker’s re-tasked workstation (to bring it back to SEAS standard-config). Loads of joy there too, I tell ya. So sick of watching scrolling text and slow-moving progress bars.
Well, that was fine, and I got back up and running in an evening, but then … oh then … my video card on the home desktop dies! DIES! I queued up 3 eps of the daily show last saturday, thinking “I’ll do about an hour on the bike, and catch up on the daily show! It’ll be great!” But of course that’s never how it works out … just as my feet were reaching for the pedals, the screen goes black, and a couple seconds later the audio locks. “Shit” … rebooted, visual artifacting on the windows loading screen. Rebooted again, no signal. Rebooted again, heavy artifacting everywhere. Probably a ram chip went bad on me, and that was it, the card was useless. So I ordered a new card.
But in ordering a new card, I made a stupid misjudgement. I ordered a radeon X1600pro. I didn’t want another geforce 6200 (disappointed with its complete lack of performance), and didn’t want to spend a lot of money (I’ve been somewhat strapped lately, because I hadn’t put in as many hours as I needed thanks to Disgaea 2). So I figured “I haven’t heard of as many windows ati-horror-stories lately, and I’ve been pretty impressed with their featuresets, so I’ll give them a shot”. Got the card Wednesday, plugged it in, it loaded up. Installed the drivers, … no signal. What? No signal.
After a couple hours experimenting with different driver versions, driver options, video settings, etc, I finally got it to reliably output a signal on DVI. But it was 1280×1024 or smaller. At 1600×1200, it flaked out, wouldn’t display at all, wasn’t even outputting a signal according to the monitor. Which sucks, because 1600×1200 is my monitor’s native, and I’m very fond of the sharpness of DVI.
Well, after a couple more hours of searching, probing, experimenting, beating my head against the screen, etc … I finally got all the various settings I can poke into such a state that I’ve got 1600×1200. But it’s on DSUB, DVI doesn’t work at all at native.
Fortunately, the DSUB signal is pretty high quality, I’ve got a reasonably good cable, and my monitor’s auto-adjust is EXCELLENT if you fill the screen with text before using it (easy enough … load up mirc, idle in animeone for 15 minutes, fullscreen it, autoadjust). It’s very nearly as sharp as DVI, and with the tiny pixels and reasonable distance that I normally live at, I can’t really tell the difference. So, I think I’m going to stick with the curse, I don’t want to eat a 15% restock fee and then pay another $30-$40 more on top of that for another card of similar performance. And, having poked around with a couple games in it, I’m quite happy with the performance I get out of it. Certainly an upgrade from shitty 6200-land, anyway.
So that was the video card drama. But there’s more! My boss’s laptop has had a slowly degrading display hinge, that’s caused the screen to wobble a bit loose. Last week, it snapped completely out, totally wrecked the hinge. Again, dell next-business-day warranty had a guy out replacing the entire top half of the laptop shell, and that was good to go.
Then, to finish out the month, Gentoo stabilized OpenSSL 0.9.8d. Lemme tell ya, there’s a LOT of stuff that doesn’t compile against OpenSSL 0.9.8d. Among other things, OpenLDAP, IPMITool, the last stable IPSec-tools. Almost everything in my lab was linked against openldap, so pruning that one out to let the system be largely consistent caused me a lot of rebuilding-headache friday, and a bit saturday. I had to keyword ipsec-tools and quit running ipmitool (which isn’t all that great anyway, so no huge loss there, I know how to get it back if I need it again). But yeah, big headaches abounded there. To make matters worse, portage apparently links things that can link against openldap (ie: have the ldap use flag) even if USE=-ldap is set, so long as the libraries are present. Similarly, it’ll link against old SSL libs even in the presence of new ones. So I ended up building new SSL, revdep-rebuilding like it said to migrate to the new SSL, watching as everything broke when I removed the old SSL libs, despite being supposedly linked against the new ones, rebuilding everything AGAIN against the new ssl libs, finding out that a couple things just didn’t want to link against them at all, finding workarounds for that, rebuilding a dozen packages that linked against things that I pruned in the “finding workarounds” stage, finding that they didn’t really stop even though I told them to, and rebuilding them again anyway. HEADACHE. I was at work till just about midnight friday night doing that, and still missed a couple things, had to go back saturday to fix them up and continue rebuilding shit.
Oh, so annoying, I tell ya. But now everything is USE=-ldap. I am still annoyed that there’s no apparent progress on stabilizing newer ipsec-tools (so I can un-keyword them), or dealing with the broken other stuff with openssl’s hilarity.
*sigh*. Such a pain. Ahh well though. Maybe October will be better on all counts. Especially since I’m over the Disgaea 2 addiction, and done with the power-playthrough of Xenosaga 3 as well…