14 Sep 2000 »
Today I conducted the largest single transaction I’ve ever done over the net – buying a new Dell Inspiron 4100 via the Dell web site.
So in a few weeks, I’ll have a nice shiny Dell sitting at home to replace my aging HP XU 6/200 dual PPro 200 and its busted 17″ monitor. The new box is fast with all the right bells and whistles – 800 MHz PIII, 32 MB GeForce2 GTS DDR, 12x DVD (I’m hoping its a model that is firmware upgradable), 128 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB 7200 RPM UltraATA 100 drive of some description. I chose not to get a wasted copy of Windows Me and instead went for Win2K as there was no Linux choice. Ripped off. Well, at least it didn’t cost the earth. In fact, it cost 27% of my HP’s cost (without cost adjustments for four years of CPI) for more than twice the processor speed. I had to get in before the Australian peso got much worse.
At least this time, the box is mostly standard. The HP has a HUGE motherboard which is probably as custom as you can get them.
I’m going to install a few operating systems on this new baby; RedHat and NetBSD and Win2K. It should be fun, especially as not every single device is yet supported.
14 Sep 2000 »
My Win2K box had conniptions this morning. Something had been in and munged a system file or two, and System File Protection was not having a bar of it (SFP is like tripwire on steroids). Frantic tearing around the house looking for 2195 installation media didn’t turn up my original holographic CD. I did find the 120 day limited trialware CD. SFP was happy with that and things worked okay… until I used Outlook, which quickly barfed.
ARGHHHHHH
I thought it might be a virus, but I’m one of the most cautious people I know. So I tried offloading all my files to Dan’s alpha, which already had Samba running on it. But softdep has this annoying habit of not immediately freeing space until the inode has been reused. So the disk was full when it wasn’t. I installed Samba onto blossom via pkgsrc (gee, it’s so hard doing this stuff: make install). The toughest part was getting a workable smb.conf in a hurry. So after a few run-ins with swat, I scp’d Dan’s and modified it to protect the guilty.
Bought a copy of NAV 2001 over the net from Symantec and installed it from their site. They get it – for a commercial vendor. Media is not needed in this day and age of fast cable connections.
Not a (known) virus.
The laptop is still a little flakey, and I don’t know what’s causing it. It’s probably up for its 3 mth re- install.
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