Hawk's Babble-Log

To those who love Sci-Fi:

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/

I’m proud to say I helped launch this site (was in beta last week). I just wish I could have contributed more.

I saw Green Hornet and thought they did a pretty good job on it. Very entertaining. Sometimes Seth Rogen is a bit annoying (or more than a bit), but I really enjoyed the overall storyline and how they pulled it off. Jay Chou kicks ass! In all ways. I like what they did with Cameron Diaz’s character and how she ties in to the team.

The bad guy Chudnofsky (played by Christoph Waltz) was really, really funny. Very entertaining.

The effects and stunts were fantastic. They were all really well done.

Directed by Michel Gondry. Written by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and George W. Trendle.

If they decide to make another one, I’ll go and see it. And I’ll buy this one when it comes out on Blu-Ray.

When I first installed Gentoo, I thought it was pretty good. It was not as easy as other distros (such as Ubuntu), but it gave me lots of control on how I wanted the system configured and set up and I really liked that. I liked it so much that I was considering using it for my main development workstation here at home.

At work, we have an old mail server set up on Gentoo. For some reason, another tech here rebooted it. It would not come back up. This happened in the middle of the afternoon, which is not the best time for things like this to happen. So I connected to it with a Remote KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) device and saw that it had failed to boot up. It was sitting there at the console with a message like this:

fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sda3
/dev/sda3:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193

This looked like a standard problem where I would need to manually run a repair on the filesystem and then reboot it. However, I soon discovered that this was a very different issue.

Searching around, I found all kinds of stuff:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-840402-start-0.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-840485.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-712186-start-0.html

I tried re-compiling the kernel with different options (about half a dozen times). I tried upgrading/downgrading specific packages such as “udev”, but that gave me lots of problems due to Portage bitching about USE flags, dependencies, masked packages, and so on. Nothing but problems with Portage. I tried boot-time options in the “kernel” line, at least 3 or four different ones. I tried many changes/tweaks/etc. Nothing worked.

Meanwhile, my boss is a very unhappy customer. And when I say “unhappy”, I mean the kind of unhappy where he begins to imagine doing bad things with weapons to my head. Luckily, he’s in another country.

But that doesn’t stop every other employee in the company from calling me up on my cell phone and telling me how I am personally ruining their lives for all eternity.

After a day or so of beating my head against the Gentoo Linux server, I said screw it and decided to migrate to a newer server. This involved getting the networking to work, creating devices in /dev, starting daemons such as sshd, and so on. But every step was difficult and cause me problems. And all the while, people calling me asking when the mail server will be back up.

I finally get all the data migrated over to the new server but things are set up very differently on Ubuntu. So it takes almost ALL weekend (working from home) to get the new server running right.

I can recommend Ubuntu. But I cannot recommend Gentoo. Why? Because all of this trouble and downtime was caused by an update. An update that Portage did at some point earlier. It was part of a whole system update. If the system had never been rebooted, I would still not know it. I would have no clue that the thing would not have booted up in the event of a power failure or whatever.

Go with Ubuntu. Leave Gentoo for those geeks who love problems (because that’s what you’ll get).

For all you Sci-Fi lovers out there!

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4451/science-fiction?referrer=OHhbQmxXGP5N04cgiNoUkQ2