The Life of Lou Ruppert

Kicked in the Gutsy

I got together with a friend of mine tonight and tried to install Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on the music studio machine in our church. It was a disaster at first. Here’s what happened:

• The initial patch update didn’t work because the capplets-data package seemed to hang indefinitely
• Installing the auth-ldap-client package and answering its questions resulted in an unconfigured machine. It ignored every answer to the wizard’s questions and went ahead and created an empty configuration file with default values.
• Rebooting the machine resulted in a bug where udevd would spawn endlessly, trying to connect to the LDAP server the empty configuration file was insisting was on 127.0.0.1
• Apparently, single-user mode also requires the LDAP server because we weren’t able to boot into maintenance mode either. Only my 15+ years of hardcore Linux experience enabled me to figure out how to disable the offending subsystem, remount the disk read-write, and update the settings to disable the LDAP auth. The average user would have had to reinstall from scratch at that point, because there was no other way to get into the system.
• The login screen kept changing resolution every time we’d switch to the other machine on the KVM. After a certain point, it would only choose resolutions that were impossible for our monitor to display. Again, a show stopper for pretty much anyone who is not a Unix expert.
• My attempt to hard-code the screen resolution in /etc/X11/xorg.conf was overridden by some unknown force to set it to a resolution not listed in that file. Why list restrictions in the file if the program is going to just do what it wants regardless?
• My attempt to set the resolution via the Résolution de l'écran menu ended up setting it to an impossible mode for the monitor to display, but instead of switching back to the original mode after thirty seconds, it remained in that mode.
• Text mode was unavailable after the initial login screen came up, because the Intel drivers forced that into an impossible configuration as well. How is one supposed to correct a problem with the main display window if the virtual ones are disabled as well?
• The fancy splash screen that is supposed to show the progress of the boot process also chooses a mode impossible to display on the monitor. What ever happened to defaulting to conservative VESA modes? So after the machine does its POST and displays the boot menu, the screen goes blank until the login screen comes up.
• The machine is pegged at a load average of nearly 2.0, because each user who logs in ends up spawning a trackerd process that takes hours to iterate our network filesystems. Does nobody at Ubuntu test these machines someplace other than on their brand new game machine in their mom’s basement?

Combine that with Monday’s announcement that Ubuntu is dropping the official release of its server product for the SPARC platform, and you can see how my opinion of Ubuntu has been plummeting recently.

SPARC hardware is reasonably priced used, typically of exceptional quality, and nearly completely resistant to a lot of the “script kiddie” attacks against Linux’s already tiny network footprint. It’s the perfect platform for small businesses to deploy because it affords them safety, quality, and performance at a reasonable price. And now, for their biggest release in a few years, Ubuntu has chosen to discontinue support for it. This after picking it up with great fanfare two years ago as the only major player to offer support for the SPARC platform. I don’t get it.

I went home angry and disillusioned, after hours of angry grumbling. It’s the first time I’ve gotten discouraged by anything in a long time. I sat around dreading the eventual problems this system would cause us, and the four hours of my life that I would never get back, the dinner I skipped, etc. Then it dawned on me that there was no need to get upset. All computer stuff causes that kind of dread if you don’t set service agreements. So, my service agreement with myself was that I would resign myself to having to repair the machine for others five times. After those five times, I could justifiably get upset. Before that, though, I’d already counted the cost and accepted it. It worked great! I have no animosity towards that system at all, tonight. And I even got to eat dinner. And meanwhile my brain is working in overdrive on how to repair some of the remaining problems.

RBN AntiVirus Saves the Day, Or Does It?

This morning I started getting a unique type of spam. It was randomized text, with a segment at the top stating that RBN Antivirus detected and removed a virus, and that I shouldn’t click any links or anything. My first thought was how odd, and highly unlikely, it was that the Russian Business Network, the biggest criminal organization on the Internet, would be censoring its own messages for viruses. Well, as it turns out, buried deep in the code, and only visible if you don’t display HTML emails, was a tiny link to malicious content on another web site. Very clever. If I get another one, I’ll try to post an example.

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