Network Progress

Yes, yet another post ranting on about the status of my network. I promise, it will be short.

Anyway, with the exception of my phone adapter, my network has been successfully reassembled. I have even put in the extra bit of effort to figure out how to get both routers on the network using both of their WAN ports. Therefore, my last network requirement has been successfully fulfilled. I have a grand total of 7 wired ports available for use.

While I was replacing the NIC in Angel's computer, I decided that I would replace her neon light also. Due to age (or rough transportation) the seal on her neon had been broken. Well, the lights that I picked up from Frys were less than stellar. The power converter did not work. Thankfully, I had the power converter that was functional from the previous light. The light kit came with 2 neon tubes and the same power converter. The only difference was the alignment of the connectors for the wires in and out of the adapter. Well, about 3 hours ago, the lights were working. As I was writing this, I glanced over and the lights were out. I have a feeling that I have a set of neons that I will have to return and replace again.

One last note about the effort put forth tonight. I had to replace the NIC in my server. Remember now, this is not really a server class machine; it is an old workstation running SuSE 10.1 that sits in my closet. Well, getting this machine up and running was not as simple as I had anticipated. I pulled the machine apart and replaced the NIC into the same PCI port that the old card was pulled from. Well, once I hooked up the KVM to the machine, I discovered that the machine was hanging on boot. This was not good news. It wouldn't even boot into safe mode. Since it was hanging on the "Standard Hotplug PCI Controller" process initiation, I pulled all of the PCI cards from the machine (NIC & sound card). This allowed the machine to boot. This was good news.

Well, since I was able to get the machine up and running, I attempted to re-install the NIC back into the same PCI slot and the symptom returned. Therefore, the next step was to put the NIC in a different slot and hope for different results. Success! This was a step in the right direction. The perplexing part is that it loaded the NIC as eth1 instead of eth0. I guess that since the card is different from what eth0 was, it isn't going to take the same configuration. Therefore, I tried to utilize the OS to make this definition simpler. Unfortunately, this is where the larger problems get introduced.

I discovered that my OS isn't behaving. Not in any sibilance of correct. In SuSE there is a utility called YaST that is used to configure just about everything you could want as an administrator. Well, nothing I did could convince this application to run. Furthermore, I couldn't even get Konsole to run. There were many applications that I tried to run that wouldn't even throw an error, it would just stop clocking. Thankfully I knew how to achieve the goal I was after. During the last network reconfiguration I figured out how to change the NIC from using DHCP to static via SSH (secure telnet) and without YaST. Therefore, to work around the application execution issue, I logged out of SuSE using KDE and switched to (failsafe) which just loaded me into the console. Once in the console, everything else was smooth sailing since the manual configuration was fresh enough in my mind.

Well, I have a distinct feeling that I will be rebuilding that machine some time in the near future. Thankfully, the machine is functional enough that I can continue to work on my immediate project and still have access to my code. I just hope that my machine will continue to work long enough for me to extract my application configurations and my source code so I can reinstall this guy in the easiest possible way. I remember the last time I built this machine. Every step of the process was painful. Even something as simple as getting my mouse to work the way I wanted it was a pain (yes, this was more of me being stubborn than anything else). Hopefully if I can remember all of the custom things I did to the machine and easily transfer the configuration from this install to the next.

Ok, I'm sorry, that wasn't nearly as short as I had anticipated it being. However, this is all I'm going to rant about tonight. Later!