Did you ever have one of those days when you could imagine the universe conspired to convince you that getting up that day was a mistake? Last night was such a day. I routinely fire up Outlook Express to find out that the server isn't responding. Hardly a reason to panic, it's been known to die for unknown reasons throughout its existence, no ping packets being thrown back either. I head for the reset button but alas upon reset, there is no resolution to the problem. No I'm concerned, never has a reset failed to bring it back online.

Anxious to find out what the problem is, I turn it off and plug it in in my room, with a monitor plugged in. To my incredible dismay, it never completes the boot sequence, the post check fails and I'm sitting there staring at the screen for 2 minutes, it reads "primary master disk failure". WTF???? This is the second disk to fail on me in a month. Before that I've only had one occurence in 11 years. Coincidentally, the other one (featured in the gallery section) had a mileage of 4 years, this one barely a year. But the disk itself isn't the problem, the data is. I used it as a multi purpose server, for samba, nfs, cvs, ltsp, apache, ftp, mysql, mail and others. Now all that configuration is lost and I'm stuck rebuilding it. I did have a backup cause of problems with the box earlier but it was a cloned partition on the same physical drive, so it's useless now. How the hell does a disk just fail instantly? It wasn't old, it wasn't worn out. A Maxtor 2.5'' 30GB drive if you must know.

So it's going to take me weeks if not months to restore what was on it. It never fails, people always learn to back up their data the hard way. Even though I grew up with Windows, which is very unsuited for system scale backups, I still don't think I would place much importance in it if it wasn't for losing data. Fortunately, backing up the system in linux is very straightfoward and with gzip/bzip2, I was surprised to learn that it compresses the whole system down to an archive of handsome size. My desktop installation, for instance, is a mere 2-3GB, perfect for dvd backup.

The reason I wanted to try Linux in the first place was that I was doing some websites and needed to mess around with cgi scripts in perl. I thought since the servers run linux, it would make sense to emulate that environment at home. The first thing I tried was Slackware, I think v3. Well that was a little much, I had a book that I borrowed from a friend but it was quite involved and I didn't really know what I was doing. I tried a couple versions of Red Hat in the years following that but there was no easy way for me to find out what exactly I needed to do to get an up and running install of apache and perl. I didn't try looking on the net because I didn't want to spend that much time on it. I also got the impression that without a thick book on Red Hat, I was totally lost. Then I heard something about Gentoo. I didn't really want to try it because I knew there are so many distros out there that trying them all doesn't make a lot of sense. The reason I did was that someone had mentioned FreeBSD and how great the ports system is, and apparently Gentoo had something similar. I don't think I would have given it much time if it wasn't for that install document. Sure, it was tough to get everything to work the first time but having this forum as well to ask questions, I succeeded in the end. By this time it wasn't really about perl anymore, I wanted to get into Linux because Windows was quite dull. So I had a working install of Gentoo, indeed I found out that portage is delightfully convenient. Apart from the time lost in compilation, packages get installed with no effort, dependencies are handled nicely and there is no issue of failed dependencies. Another thing that I really liked was the colors in the console. It's a simple detail but it makes a difference, it makes the shell less intimidating. I also felt that the documentation was not merely trying to explain how to do it, but also briefly explain why you're doing it. This is brilliant for someone who doesn't know what is what.

Since then I've been running Gentoo on a server with various services like apache, samba, cvs, mail, mysql etc. Lately I've also started thinking about using it as a desktop OS. I still rely on certain things like Dreamweaver but

the list of missing software is getting shorter. I've stuck with Gentoo for a couple of reasons.

Number one is this forum. Whenever there's a problem, chances are the issue has already been noted and fixed by someone else. Now people will say that you can get support for any distro, there are websites, mailing lists, irc channels etc. I have to say I'm not a big fan of the latter two. I happen to like fora, they're convenient, they have a certain atmosphere to them and they're easily searchable. I have tried finding fora for Suse but I haven't found any, the links were either 404 or the fora were deserted.

Reason #2 is portage. In the past year or so I've tried a bunch of different distros. After all, if there is something better, why not use it? I've looked at Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Lindows, Xandros, Debian and Knoppix. I've come to realize that none of them work as well for me as Gentoo does. The main reason is always portage. I've heard people say rpm is easy, there's a simple set of commands to use and you can compile from source if you want to. That very well may be, but for some reason I have never succeeded. Perhaps I'm not fit to understand but I can never figure out where to get the packages and how to install them smoothly. Whenever I try, I always have a list of dependencies missing and chances are that along the way one of them is incompatible with something else or a previously installed version of itself. Even when I succeed at installing something, I feel locked down because I know that should I want to upgrade it or remove it, I may have to go through another long session. And while compiling does take a long time, it's effortless, everything is done for me. Even though I don't have to compile rpm, it always me over an hour, sometimes more, to find the right package, solve dependencies etc. I prefer to leave emerge running while I do something else. Then there's the option to compile, well I've tried that as well, a couple of weeks ago I was trying to install ntop on Red Hat 7.3. I have barely compiled anything in my life save watching portage and I tried for hours without succeeding. I thought everything was in order, but autoconf wouldn't stop complaining about a failed dependency.

So that's rpm, and unfortunately most of the biggest distros are rpm-based. They're not very good at keeping your system up-to-date, Red Hat had that RHN service but apparently it would stop working after a short while unless you register for it. Mandrake lets you define an ftp path as a source of updates but I could never get that working evenso. And Suse takes ages often, to just figure out what packages are new and the selection is limited. This is how portage really excels, the sheer volume of packages available is stunning and unmatched in any easy-to-use distribution I have seen. So then Debian. Well, Debian is not as nice as Gentoo. And I didn't know where to look for documentation. So as long as I have Gentoo and I don't mind compiling everything, there is little incentive to use Debian. Xandros and Lindows are Debian based but they don't make Debian that much easier, they just give you a nice desktop.

And some people say the builds always break, I can't compile anything because it won't finish. Perhaps I have been exceptionally fortunate but from all the packages I've installed, very few builds have failed to complete. Even when they don't, all you have to do is try the older or the newer version of the ebuild, and if you're stuck check the forum/bugzilla and that's it.

Thus I've found out that most distributions are fine if you're satisfied just using whatever they give you on the install disc. But if I want to use mplayer, then I'm gonna have to look elsewhere and rarely is it as easy to install as with Gentoo. And it's not that I have to use all the newest software. But as long as I know that I can, I'm thinking there's no reason not to be able to do it on any other distribution.

In the course of these two years, using the Gentoo documents and most importantly, reading this forum, I have learnt a lot about Linux. And I'm still a complete newbie but with a little guidance, I can compile a kernel, I can install a couple of services and sometimes I can even predict where to find something in this cryptic filesystem. As a Windows user for a decade, I'm not used to learning anything because there's not a lot to learn. But I've come to accept that some things take a little understanding and reading documentation before trying to install something can actually save you some time later on when you're trying to find out why this or that.

So thanks a lot Daniel Robbins and long live Gentoo!

I came across a great piece about computer security today, thanks to the rss client I set up a few days ago. Most notably, how Microsoft's approach to personal computer security is completely pointless. Recommended: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/11/13/1938257

On a sidenote, rss is great, I'm loving it. No more checking various outlets for stories, now I got it all in one place. Get Liferea for Linux or FeedDemon for Windows.

I guess it's one of those days.. I needed to move my stuff from one drive onto another and not surprisingly, there was trouble ahead. All the partitions containing docs, software, install files etc moved along just fine, did a simple rsync in linux. The Gentoo partitions were just as well behaved, they took to their new homes with no questions asked but then comes the big, ugly monster: the Windows partition. I had never tried copying one before and I didn't think too much of it, I thought as long as I got all the files across it would be all good. Not so fast! Copying the files over in linux failed miseably, I ended up with a corrupt, unbootable Windows (apparently there's more to a fat32 than meets the eye, at least as far as Windows is concerned).

A quick search on google revealed that I might be more successful with Norton Ghost so I tried that then, and voilá it seemed to work fine. At this point I was quite impressed and relieved that I had been able to transfer the beast without reinstalling all my software. I had set up all my partitions on the new drive and was ready to format the old one when it somehow turns out the Windows install isn't in good shape at all. Once I plugged out the old drive, the new one was left with the exact same boot handicap I discovered earlier. Quite puzzling that was, I thought I had been booting from my new drive all this time, there was nothing to suggest otherwise and apparently Windows had been consulting the old drive just the same. Talk about disturbing behavior under the hood.

Well there was no way back, the old drive had been wiped and the new wouldn't boot. Windows installer, here I come. Basically, I had spent 3 days trying to avoid this boring, drawn out, horrible process and I ended up having to go through with it all the same. Thank you so very f. much, Redmond!

I got a book the other day, off ebay. I found out that was a good policy for getting books, check them out on amazon and buy on ebay. The book is Cricket Liu/Paul Albitz: "DNS and BIND", a classic. I felt I needed to brush up on my modest knowledge of dns and the book checked out, enough in there to keep me occupied for a while.