This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!

Jeff Basham jeff at jeffbasham.com
Thu Oct 4 16:17:17 PDT 2001


This sounds scaringly similiar to the situation at Piner.  I refuse to help
them with network issues and their NT "domain" until they convert all the
servers to Linux.  They have everything running NT and 2K and I run into
issues daily that I have no clue how to fix - something that I rarely run
into otherwise.

The security software we use - Fortres - works well.  There have been no
issues with it - except for that one system that would not boot after we
installed Fortres on it.  A format and re-install worked to fix it.

Just my experiences :)
-Jeff

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lincoln Peters" <lincoln_peters at hotmail.com>
To: <talk at nblug.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 3:53 PM
Subject: This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!


> For those of you who don't know what I've been working on in my spare time
> for the past two months (or only have heard parts of it), I'll recap it.
> Otherwise, skip to paragraph 4.
>
> When I heard that Rancho Cotate High School was to convert all of their
new
> (?) computers to run Windows NT and revolve around an NT server, I was
> highly skeptical.  After about 100 blue screens of death in three months,
> one loses all faith in Microsoft products as being useful beyond
> rediculously simple tasks (e.g. Wordpad).  Before they had begun moving to
> Windows NT, all of the non-Macintosh computers were running Windows 98SE
and
> a third-party security program that caused about 50 times as many random
> crashes as normal, and I cracked in about a minute using a generic rescue
> disk.  The Macintoshes were even worse.  They had a totally different
> third-party security program that screwed up countless systems (one iMac
> even refused to eject a floppy diskette), and I could have cracked it just
> as easily as the PC's if I had had a bootable Macintosh CD-ROM.
>
> Before the last school year was out, there were already several Windows NT
> workstations around the school.  Some worked, and some didn't.  In fact, I
> had never heard our foreign exchange teacher from England use any swear
> words until he got one of those workstations!  Another teacher was so fed
up
> with his NT workstation, he wiped the hard disk (using a Linux boot disk
and
> "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda") and installed Windows 95 on it!
>
> I had no confidence that they would have the NT network in a usable state
by
> September, so in August, I got to work on an alternative.  With a little
> help from Mike (okay, a lot of help) in regard to NFS, I set up a 486
> computer with two surplus SCSI harddrives, plus the original IDE hard
drive,
> an NE2000 Network card, and the NFS service.  With a little additional
> effort to set up the workstation filesystem on the third harddrive, I had
a
> working netbooting server by the first week of school.  Just boot off a
> floppy and it mounts its root filesystem from the server using NFS.  Okay,
> it took me a month to diagnose all of the hardware issues with the
> workstations, but it works pretty well now.
>
>
> That is, it works pretty well for me, because I know what I'm doing.  I
> couldn't run GNOME or KDE on any of the workstations because they only
have
> 64MB of memory (aack!) and it is impossible to set up any sort of swap
> device when netbooting.  By default, it now runs FVWM2 when users log in,
> and the default configuration (at least it's the default in RedHat 7.1)
will
> probably get a big "Huh?" from everyone who looks at it.  It took me 30
> seconds to figure out that I was supposed to click on the desktop to get
any
> kind of a Start menu (there was nothing at all like a "Start" button), so
it
> would probably take most people 30 minutes to figure it out.  I couldn't
> find any session manager that was any frendlier and that didn't overload
> that precious little 64MB of memory.  It's weird, though, because I
remember
> that in RedHat 6.1, FVWM had a "start" button.
>
> Even worse, the "Programs" section of the menu is empty!  I can't see any
> way that anyone besides myself would feel comfortable starting programs
> using an XTerm!  I guess I'm somewhat spoiled because Ximian GNOME runs on
> my home computer (it has 256MB of memory), so I have no experience with
> setting up FVWM2 or any other session manager besides KDE.  Can anyone
clue
> me in on how configure it?
>
> A few other minor issues exist, but I want to have _something_ that is
> actually usable for ordinary people before I tackle them.  If this seems
> daunting right now, I can't imagine what it'll be like when I try to port
> this to the iMacs!
>
>
> (Some of you may remember that I was originally trying to use the server's
> root filesystem as the workstations' root filesystem.  When I tried that,
I
> found that the necessary changes in the initscripts were so extensive and
so
> weird that I finally said to myself, "Ah, ***** it," and got the third
> harddrive for the workstations' root filesystem.)
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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>



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