moving Randomland to its own machine again

[Nick]

I think moving Randomland back to a dedicated machine would help speed things up (and let it use the ram more efficiently.) I have an old pentium D that has been doing rather little since I experimented with the virtual machine. Moving it there will give it access to 2 gigs of ran rather then 1 and both processor cores. 

[zourtney]

Are you still thinking of doing this? Do we need to purchase some DPDDR* to enhance performance? Let me know if you need any help or anything. Plus, I have my old desktop which can be farmed out for something, if you want.

* double-priced double double rate [random access memory]

[Nick]

I think the old D-machine can handle it. Its running okish in the VM with only a gig.  In its new home it will have 2 gigs (more then enough until the price comes back down) and 2, 2.6 ghz cores to play with. Plus lots more hard space for all those pictures. Any suggestions for a linux distro? Its on fedora 11 now, but it (and 10) don't seem to play nice with the DSL connection (keep getting PTO packet timeout errors) I am mostly sure its a software thing but I have no idea what program to replace. I would be up for trying Unbuntu or CentOS 5.(Or MacOS for fun. But that would be hard to get.)

[zourtney]

If I were setting it up, I'd try out a *buntu, but only because I am familiar with it. I have heard sketchy things about their new 9.10 release, but I think that was only for in-place upgrades from 9.04. Either way, I have not personally had any problems with it. It's not superior; rather, it's just the first distro that didn't make me puke "linux" and give up. They have forums a'plenty (though the Fedora community probably does, too).

[Nick]

If I can get the buntuins to connect and stay connected to the DSL then I have no problem with running that. I like their VNC implementation better anyway. I just HATE the network manager. It is so buggy and frustrating.

[zourtney]

True, that is utterly useless. It gives you the option to select a static IP and then totally ignores it. That might be fixed now, though.

[Nick]

After playing with the ubuntu again I am just as frustrated as ever. The network manager sucks. Everyone agrees that it sucks. People complain all the time that it sucks and there are dedicated areas of the internet trying to give advice to alternatives. The thing wont tell you want hardware belongs to what ethernet port, so you are left to just plug cables in and see what device can then connect. The DSL connection still does not work with Qwest. I could probably get it satisfactory, but I would have to do all the networking via the command line and config files. Yuck.

So I am going to give CentOS 5 a try out. If that flops then I will try something more massive and robust... perhaps Debian or mandrake. Probably Debian because I like RPMs. Though I think CentOS should do fine. I am used to it and its little quirks.

P.S. I noticed ubuntu not being able to resolve DNS info without me manually entering the server IPs. Last disro (9.04 I think) that worked fine. It gets the routers info just fine for the gateway IP and DNS server ip (the router is a DNS relay) but seems to fail in actually trying to resolve names. Unless, that is, I give it the ISP's DNS server IPs manually. Frump.

That was long. Sorry. Linux just frustrates me. I know they don't have the ability to test thing with all the hardware out there, but these problems seem like failures in basic usability. Maybe it will work better on my laptop. As a non-gateway server or as a desktop OS Ubuntu works fine.

[Nick]

It has been done. With some minor differences randomland is now back up and running on its own machine. CentOS 5 is what the OS is.

So far no networking issues that were pissing me off with ubuntu. And none of the PTO packet timeouts from fedora 11 (its a DSL thing, and thats about all I know)

So far so good.

Oh.... I guess the mail server is still down for a while.