The psychotic rage of the long-distance sysadmin.

Yesterday I beat my head against Debian. The testing netinst is a locked-room mystery (if your CPU is too old for the newly default 686-pae kernel, there is not actually any way to install the 486 kernel), but #debian assures me that "the testing installer is not there for installing debian." How foolish of me. (Though the netinst maintainer was interested and helpful. Actual problem was failure to detect a Geode, possibly the last pre-686 likely to be found in the wild.) Stable worked. autofs is entirely made of cocks, as is udev. This page misleads — you probably want subsystem=="block" rather than "scsi". Worked out the magickal incantations to make Samba behave. And now its hostname works on the intranet too. Fucksake. I hate computers so much.

arkady offered to glare at it — she has the BOFH superpower of glaring at machinery to make it work, probably from being a mother — but the trouble with Debian is that it glares back. Self-assured little shit.

(Installing Debian with a nonfree network card is like having a little RMS on your shoulder, lecturing you while smelling bad.)

Thanks to gmh for the spare 2GB CF cards. Though it turns out they didn't fit after all. Argh. I could yakshave my way to a CF/2.5"IDE adapter from eBay, or I could ... just ... leave it. Yeah.

Freda is utterly delighted by home-made YouTube wooden railway Thomas videos. "They're telling their OWN stories!" Four years old and she's discovered fanfic.

This has been a ridiculously exhausting "holiday." I look forward to being back at work so I can relax a bit in a CBeebies-free environment.