i spent almost all day yesterday installing a server here in our lab. it talks to a mac network, a unix network, and a winNT network. when i got the machine i booted it into the dell-installed NT for five minutes (well, the boot took twenty, but it was up for five) to get the hardware stats and such from the machine, then inserted a redhat bootdisk and erased the whole drive. the machine is now pure linux, and totally screams (450mhz pII, 128MB ram, 10/100mb ethernet). ...and thus began the uptime battle (the guys here in the lab don't believe that linux stays up for weeks at time, so we are going to have an uptime contest[1]).
fastforward to the present --- today i had a bad morning... i woke up early with a bad headache. i got to work on time only to find i'd left my badge on my dresser, meaning i couldn't even open the outside doors. so i went back home, and the rain got really heavy. when i got back to work, all the parking spots were taken, so i got really wet on the long walk... walked into the lab, opened the door, and the new linux server's monitor was displaying the patented winNT 3d pipes.
"oh no," says my delirious, aching brain, "somebody blew away linux and installed NT on my server..."
(that's the one drawback to having linux ports of those famous OpenGL screensavers in jwz's xscreensaver collection...)
Tue, 23 Mar 1999 10:09:05
[1] -- i definitely won the uptime battle. i shut down my server in june to upgrade the kernel, and then shut it down the next time in december while helping diagnose network problems (no problems with my server, as proved by the same behavior after the reboot). not a single hitch for six months.
Mon Jan 31 00:21:18 EST 2000