11:30 PM

There’s been all sorts of computer drama around the ol’ homestead these past few weeks.

It all started the day before I left for Ryan and Sarah’s wedding. I hadn’t learned my lesson yet:

Even now, I don’t know what actually happened. The GRUB bootloader on Arbonne — then called Yorktown, and temporarily named Al-Rassan in a fit of nostalgia — couldn’t find the recently-upgraded kernel and, therefore, couldn’t boot. My efforts to get around this little problem all failed - even the boot disk I’d created could only get me to a terminal prompt to make sure the home directory was still intact. I left for vacation with a busted server, which was a worry I could have done without.

I came back and the vacation had done me good, though it had not gotten Arbonne (as I now thought of it again, having recognized my mistake of having named it after one machine that had already died) back up in service. I figured out how to get the DVD-ROM working again - did you know there’s a little bridge in the back that sets it as a master or slave? I do now. The CD-ROM is still kaput, but now that I had something that could read a CD I could at least try to reinstall GRUB, or some other bootloader.

Long story short: Fedora Core 2 disks still don’t work, but Red Hat 9 disks do, therefore, Red Hat 9 won. Despite my grumbling about it, I would have rather had Fedora Core because everything was already configured for it. And updates are easier, when they don’t shut down your whole system.

Now that things are running right again, I should remember the lesson I learned: not broken, don’t fix. It took three weeks to get back to where I was before things went wonky, and I don’t know if it was because of something actually going wrong or my tinkering. I’m inclined to think it was the latter, as I have no proof otherwise.

But somehow, despite all of this, I think I’ll still upgrade to Fedora Core 3 when it’s released in November. Some people never learn.