Knocking down some pins

After a night of bowling (broke personal record with 118), B's computer was suffering from a BSOD error. Some stop error that indicates that most likely something is wrong with some device driver. She claims high and low that she did NOT download and/or install anything that could have caused this. Yeah right; she uses IE. We all know that God only knows what gets installed on your computer when you live life as dangerously as that.

Overnight I checked the memory with mem86; just to be sure. Don't want to end up simply swapping out memory modules after a week of endless efforts fixing this baby ;-) mem86 didn't report any errors after hours of testing. Darn; too bad it's not that simple.

I had not updated this computer to SP2 yet, so I am taking some risk now by using a Windows XP SP2 CD to repair her Windows installation. We'll see what happens. Oh great, now it wants the original drivers that I installed for the motherboard. The CD that came with the board, just has Windows 2000 drivers. Looking from the path, I probably had downloaded later versions from Abit. Sigh... Burned the latest drivers on CD and of we go again.

I need to check what programs B is using and verify if she could do all that with Linux. That would make my life sooo much easier. Or I should do what MIS at my office does: If you brake it, we will recover your workstation by putting the original image back. That will force you to make backups ;-) It motivates me at least ;-)

Speaking of backups: What do you use to make your backups? What does your schedule look like? I know I have gotten a little sloppy when it comes to backups. I used to make backups and even stored a copy off-site; usually at work; just have an extra copy and to have something if my house would burn down. It's such small of an effort, that you wonder why people don't do it. Key is that it should be automated; that's what I did on my parents computers: Just a daily task that makes a backup of their 'Documents and Settings' directory.

On my Linux box I make somewhat regular backups of my /home and try to keep up with the configuration changes I make in CVS. I should move to Subversion for that though, as we have made that move at the office too. Setting it up is so much easier, as well as using it. Branches, trunks and tags; it has all become so much clearer to me since we've started using SVN. I can really recommend taking a look at it.

Back to Windows troubles... I managed to get the system up and running again after a repair with the XP SP2 CD. With Hitman Pro I managed to rid the system of the majority of its ad- and spyware, so B should be all good to go again. Apart from some weird stuff with the shared OfficeJet 5110 printer, that refuses to print more than one copy at a time, even when you tell it to print more. I kinda gave up on that one... Sorry Bill.

CentOS

This week I stumbled across something called CentOS while checking into White Box Enterprise Linux next version. I had seen (and actually downloaded) v3 of WBEL, but was wondering if something had happened with the recent RHEL4 beta... Unfortunately nothing had been done with it, and while browsing for other alternatives for RHEL, I came across CentOS.

Using BitTorrent I was able to download the DVD images for 3.4 as well as 4beta. On my office workstation I installed a clean (and full) install of 4beta inside a virtual machine using VMWare (love that program!). Everything worked flawlessly, except for some startup trouble with the wrong SCSI emulation; this had more to do with me not paying attention, than with CentOS not dealing well with this issue.

I am checking out CentOS, because at the office we have several production level boxes running a version of Fedora, and others that run RHEL3. The latter are mainly servers used for external access, where the former are mainly used for corporate duties like branch HTTP proxy or development box. Recently though, we have started to pilot our Skool concept (http://www.skool.nl - in Dutch). Because of cost effectiveness it was decided to use Fedora Core 2 for the servers in the schools, although they could actually be considered to be production boxes. While going through the initial pilot/test/development phase we noticed that Fedora moves forward way too fast for the purpose we were planning to use it for. That's why we are now considering other options. Because most of engineer are already familiar with RedHat type distributions, and because we're already running RHEL3 on our most important servers, I consider it to be a logical step to look into something like CentOS.

Besides having the opportunity to run a free (as in beer) RHEL equivalent OS, we are able to make our server platforms more homogenic and more straightforward to maintain: Updates roll out to all Linux servers; new software can be packaged for just one platform and not two or three; we benefit from the stability of an enterprise level OS and the assurance that we will be able to update the boxes the next five years! Awesome dude!