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Sunday, 07 May 2006

free (but not free) server

Last week somebody asked me if I wanted a server. I said uh, sure.

Some company was retiring an "old unix server" since they just got a replacement and I was asked if I wanted the old one. I guess they turned to me because this was a unix server (whoa...). Of course this is just a vanilla Gateway® server so it hardly matters what OS is currently on it, but whatever.

After I agreed to take this thing I was wondering what kind of Unix it was running. Solaris? No, it would probably have been running on Sun hardware if so. AIX? No, it would have been an IBM server most likely. A flicker of an idea about another possibility entered my mind, but I quickly banished it.

So I take possesion of the server. I look it over. Not too bad... dual 733MHz P3 with four scsi hard drives and it even has a redundant power supply. For some inexplicable reason it has only 256 MB of ram, but I should be able to add some more.

I plug in the beast (did I mention it weighs like 75 lbs?) and fire it up. After I get through the bios crap and initializing all those drives, I get to see what os it's running. It's .... SCO Unixware! Yea!!!

The server came to me at no cost, but obviously it is not free, because it is haunted by viral IP and burdened by evil daemons (what a P-OS). I think it's time to set this poor thing free. On a side note, unixware takes like 10 minutes to boot up (time until I get a login prompt). That's pretty fucking sad. Anyway, it's time to format and install Linux!

xtra suckage

I was doing a Windows XP Pro SP2 clean install on someone's computer the other day when I was greeted with this lovely error:

Windows is telling me, in the middle of the initial install, that ' ' (as in NULL/nothing/no text/empty) is not verified to be compatible with windows xp. Hmmm.... I wonder WTF ' ' might be. Then it has the nerve to ask me whether I "want to continue installing the software"!! Yes or no... I hope I pick the right fucking option because I don't have a fucking clue what it is talking about.

This incident made me rembemer a little logo I created when XP first came out. If only my "Resist XP" campaign had worked. Sigh.