ten buck fedora 2782

Nope, and I've never claimed to be a genius Sysadmin, just a fairly functional one. For one thing, since late 1988, it's never been my full time job, just a task that's been part of my work day doing other things as my main line of work.

I did watch with some amazement as a much more experienced sysadmin than I am sat down to an HPUX system on which he'd forgotten the root pbuttword because he rarely used that machine, and in 15 minutes with no hardware buttist, became root by hacking skills. I have for years deliberately avoided learning such tricks, I don't trust myself to use them benignly.

Eventually, I did manage to break into the second hand system that is the subject of this thread, and null the root pbuttword, but since then I've replaced the OS with newer versions several times, so the original problem has "gone away". (My eventual low tech method was to use a "single CD" Linux that would run from ramdisk but still work in my constrained (128M RAM, 200MHz clock) setup (which the Knoppix release I have in hand would not do), mount the root parbreastion, and use vi() to take out the pbuttword encryptions frometc-shadow. That's what worked for me, but I'm now running SimplyMEPIS after first trying a couple of versions of Mandrake (9.0 and 10.0) with SimplyMEPIS inserted and removed in between, then reinstalled at the end, and now my workhorse tool. It was the best of a not-too-hot set of choices, but I sure miss the games in the original kit as it was sold to me. SimplyMEPIS won out when it recognized all my USB devices without user intervention, and kept the sound working, which latter Mandrake failed to accomplish.

I also reparbreastioned the system, and got a dead second hard drive back working with some bad block cleanups.

SimplyMEPIS, however, is a one-CD release, and so has a dearth of software I expect to find in any Unix work-alike, even emacs is missing. So, I'm using alien() to convert the RPMs of Mandrake 10.0 to DEBs of MEPIS (it has taken five days on that slow hardware, but should be done when I get home today), and will be installing such of them as will function, little by little. I've already done this a couple of times around, though not for the full kit of them, almost three Gibibytes of RPMS, from the Mandrake 9.0 release, which I'd had in hand for a couple of years now. SInce it's a much bigger release than the 10.0 one I have, I may well go back and scavange some stuff from that as well. I have lots of storage space, with a 256GB external hard drive that might be 7% full by now, and 23GB formatted capacity in the two internal HDs, pretty good for the antiquity of the hardware. I'm using the smaller one purely as a data store to do the alien() conversion, so the rest of the stuff I do isn't quarreling for that busy HD.

Unix has grown a lot since my heavy sysadmin experiences from 1985 to 1988, 1992 to 1994, 1996 to 1998, and in 1999 to 2000, and Linux seems a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Stuff likeetc-alternatives just promote confusion without wonderful tradeoffs.

I didn't say "never", I said "twice per year". I go back to the days of punch card computing, letter perfect and intensely careful typing becomes a habit with that kind of a start, where every typo meant typing a whole card again, and every mistake in a software source code cost a one day turnaround to see the failure so it could be fixed.

Naturally, I'm getting a lot sloppier than that today, with good editors and "uparrow to edit and repeat" command line interfaces. I love vim() as an editing tool like a lover would, but using it has sure ruined my typing accuracy.

xanthian.

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