My new old box

[alexander]

Started setting up my new old box. Just got it last week, but never had set enough time to play with it.
Finally today, brought it in to school to start setting it up on a faster connection and help. First of all, couldnt boot it into knoppix; doesnt suport 2 scsi buses, so ok booted into gentoo live, after first downloading and burning it. After about 3 tries of setting up partitions, finally got those right and just as things were looking good, dhcp doesnt load, cant ping the servers, nothing, so we figured that the network card driver is not the right one. Battle with that turned into another hour, finally got it working, funny actually it just started working all of a sudden, first time ever that there was no explanation as to what happened and why it worked (really rare in Linux). In the time left, sync ed the box, uploaded portage trees, just got it realy for bootstrapping tomorrow, hopefully all goes well...

___________________

Remember, violence is not the answer, its the solution. And it doesnt solve anything, it just ends it once and for all.

[alexander]

hmm, noone has anything to say huh?
ok, the reason it is a new old box is that i just got it, but it is a decomissioned server.
I left out specs on purpose, i guess noone is interested, oh well...

[IrishEyes]

alexander,
i'd love to hear more. sorry for the delay in reply, trying to keep up with lots of threads while Tormod is away.
a decomissioned server? sounds interesting. where did u get it from?
also, i really like the fact that you are so into your stuff. i was just telling Mr. Irish about you tonight, and he was interested in reading some of your stuff. he's into computers as well, much more than i. i was asking the difference between fedora and gentoo, which was better, etc... and as so often happens when i ask him a computer question, it turned into at least a half hour 9almost0 lecture, inlcuding history on how evil MS is, and why nobody in their right mind would willingly choose to run an MS-based box....yada yada yada...gotta love it!
Mr. Irish also had lots to say about your conspiracy theories that you mentioned in the new forums. he contracts out to govvies, so he knows a little about that stuff.
anyhow, this is a good thread for me to relax in, as nobody argues too much in here. what an intellectually stimulating place to be

[BEAKER]

Take a deep breath now; in with the good air; out with the bad.

AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

That's much better.














What were we talking about?

[alexander]

Sorry IrishEyes, i wasnt getting discouraged, just was perplexed, thought it would interest people, i guess i wasnt very wrong....

where did u get it from?

Pratt & Whitney, they have this sale of their equipment, and this was their last of the kind, so i took it, pretty cheap, those servers go for $3200 on ebay.

and as so often happens when i ask him a computer question, it turned into at least a half hour 9almost0 lecture, inlcuding history on how evil MS is, and why nobody in their right mind would willingly choose to run an MS-based box....yada yada yada...gotta love it!

Well, Mr.Irish is right, and noone in their right mind should run an MS box.
We just found this out yesterday; my college is a part of MSDNA group (microsoft free software for state colleges whatever it is), so we were faced with a task to make images of the "free" microsoft software available for students, so they can walk into a classroom put in a disk and burn the soft for themselves. But the burning software that is provided with windows does not burn ISO's so instead of spending $10,000, on Nero we went to k3b (an openscource sofware with a GUI interface, menus, shiny buttons, etc...). A friend of mine was given a task to document the burning procedure. Well the k3b part was easy, but we needed to make the system mount the remote windows 2k3 server filesystem (since thats where the images are), and thats when we found out that 2k3 uses CIFS. Microsoft made the change to make 2k3 more incompattible with samba... lol

the difference between fedora and gentoo, which was better, etc...

for a user that knows little of linux Fedora is ok, for a linux proffesionals Gentoo is the place to be. Not saying that Gentoo can only be operated by professionals, put it this way, if you know how to do something, or set something up in Gentoo, you can set it up in any other linux distribution. You can read more about it at http://www.gentoo.org
Oh, just to give anyone who's interested some more information:
its a compaq server, 4 700Mhz Xeons, 1 Gig of ram, 4 9.1Gig SCSI HDs hot swapable, dual power supplies, also hot swapable, hot swapable PCI cards and fans.
Bootstrapped it yesterday, took 77 minutes to bootstrap and 113 minutes to compile the kernel.

[geko]

I'd love to be able to talk about this alexander but dont know anything to be able to help - it would all just turn into questions lol...

As and aside though, talking of knoppix, ive got a version of this that boots straight from cd-rom, you can put it on your hardrive if you want but dont have to - which im finding kinda cool at the mo because havent switched from MS yet.

Also, gentoo? I was thinking of going down the mandrake root i think when i finally get around to getting another system. I was going to go the mandrake root as i really think i want a 'professional' linux that can do everything even though i dont know mcuh yet, i'd then grow into it with there being a large learning curve i believe - never heard of gentoo before now - any comments on mandrake? Or gentoo versus mandrake? Thx

[alexander]

any comments on mandrake? Or gentoo versus mandrake? Thx

1) Mandrake uses RPM packages
2) Mandrake is not a Package managing system its package packaging system
3) Gento init scripts are a lot better than Mandrakes (have way more featuresa and such)
4) You get to descide everything about your system when instaling Gentoo, impossible in Mandrake
5) Mandrake's mascot is a star, a STAR!!! What kind of a system uses a STAR as their mascot???

As and aside though, talking of knoppix, ive got a version of this that boots straight from cd-rom, you can put it on your hardrive if you want but dont have to - which im finding kinda cool at the mo because havent switched from MS yet

Knoppix is a linux that runs off of a CD! It was developed specifically for that purpose. BTW 4.7 will be released soon.

I was going to go the mandrake root as i really think i want a 'professional' linux that can do everything even though i dont know mcuh yet, i'd then grow into it with there being a large learning curve i believe

Gentoo is WAY more professional than Mandrake. You have WAY more control over everything in Gento over mandrake. Go to http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/faq.xml#differences