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Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
New policies in Geek Land
14:40:00 on 2005-08-22

Last night I was doing relative support; my cousin Mattie's computer, again. They were having more modem problems, in that the modem just quit working. The Diamond shotgun modem I put in their computer quit working. I like the Diamond shotguns; they work well, they're hardware modems so they don't leech CPU time from the computer, and people have been using them for years without problems. But not Mattie and crew.

Apparently, they don't think anything of conditioning the power or protecting the phone line from lightning strikes. Of course, they don't, because they can ask me to fix it and buy parts for it instead of spending $30.00 for the equipment to protect what they already have. In fact, half the time they complain to whoever will listen that their computer is old and slow, with the added implication that I myself always have a faster, newer one. Well, dear hearts, I work hard for my pay, so if I want a new Athlon 64 with a fast video card, I guess I can go out and buy one for myself. Consider the merits of doing the same yourselves, and you too can have a newer computer. Until then, suffer or go without! Beggars can't be choosers. (Well, they can, but it doesn't get them very far.)

As well, it goes without saying that she had twenty updates from Microsoft to run, plus the antivirus and AdAware hadn't been updated in forever. Oh, and she'd been browsing and playing games as the local administrator, too, even though I'd told her to use that account only for installing software and doing updates.

I guess she doesn't care to take care of her computer, so why should I? I put a USB Winmodem in the box; it takes about forty percent of the CPU to use the modem. The box is already slow, according to them, so what's a little slower? I ran all their updates and cleaned another bit of spyware off the box, and I leave it at that. I am done with their computers, forever.


Add to this that while I was doing this relative support I was also trying to update the software on my main server. I run Gentoo Linux, so that means I can just run emerge to get the latest and greatest. Of course, when you have a mixed field of the latest and greatest, plus a bunch of old stuff you don't want to upgrade, you get problems � the inability to load shared libraries in a whole host of programs caused a problem.

So what'd I do today? I spent a good chunk of the day fixing this, updating that, repairing that. Now everything's working fine, but, as I said, it took me most of the morning tracking down dependencies and recompiling a large number of the systems on my server.


This has caused me to institute two new policies at my place.

  • "Relative support" ceases immediately. Your need for a computer means nothing to me. If it breaks, pay to have it fixed. Better yet, part with $400.00 and get a Dell. You can get a support contract for another $75.00 or so. Gotta do a paper or your taxes or a flier for your church? Darn. Tough break! Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to visit some spyware-infested website running with administrative privileges (even though I originally made Firefox your default browser).

  • If it ain't broke, don't fix it! My servers are actually servers, fergadzakes. It's behind a firewall. I keep an eyeball on exploits for my current software versions. I don't care so much about feature upgrades for the most part; server software tends to have the same feature set all the time. Why am I upgrading stuff for grins and giggles?

    I need to build out my new server and use this old one as a test server. Upgrade things, get them tweaked, test them out, and then after a period of everything being okay I can move the changes to my production server. A more sane, administration-oriented policy, I think.

    I think I caught this upgrade disease from work, because for some reason we love to change things that work for no particular reason. It's sport around here. I think it's done just to get us higher budgets every year.

All in all, this has been a live-and-learn experience. It has also made me realize that I need to start working on things more actively. I know I say that a lot, though, so we'll see.

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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