If It Ain't Broke...

I'm a computer professional - it says so right here on the box! If that's so then why have I spent the past 3 days upgrading my computer workstation when by rights it should have taken me a couple of hours?

I guess the fact that the workstation is more than just a machine I purchased at the local Future Shop probably has a bit to do with it, along with the fact I don't run Windows on it.

You see I push the limits of many of the technologies we think of as commonplace these days. Let me tell you a bit about it...

I've been a non-Windows person for much of my computer life. In fact, Microsoft Windows had not been written (Microsoft didn't invent it, people at Xerox PARC did - then Apple perfected it and Microsoft warped it to sit on top of their text-based MS-Dos) by about 20 years when I first started working with computers in the early 1970s. I'd played with them for almost 15 years prior to that - including a very primitive hardware "computer trainer" back in my grade 10 electronics class. It had just enough logic on it to make an 8-bit "ring counter" if you wired it just right.

But I seriously got into selling and using computer systems in 1975, working for Bell & Howell's business products division where I sold a system of hand-held data capture units that were based on some of the first CMOS microcomputer chips and technologies. The "Scorepad" from Azuredata was a hand-held unit aimed at doing inventory in retail stores via the then new bar-code system. I've still got one kicking around the house somewhere. Then in 1976 when I worked for Dataline Systems, a Digital Equipment DEC 10 time-sharing company, I got introduced to multi-user systems with batch and background tasking, and I've been loath to use systems any less ever since.

So later, when I worked for Radio Shack's computer division the single-tasking nature of the original PC operating systems, TRS-Dos, Apple DOS, etc. left me frustrated to say the least. The only ray of hope was an extension to CP/M called MP/M which allowed multiple users to do several things on a machine via dumb terminals connected to it. 

Then I became a store manager for Radio Shack, moved to Victoria, BC, and along came the Radio Shack Model 16 - a Xenix-based upgrade to their Model II business PC. I'd played with Unix a very small amount on a PDP-11 that some friends used in their research at UBC so I had a bit of understanding of what Xenix was all about. I also had the yearning to stretch the hardware to its limits and continue to do so today. You see a computer sitting idle just seems under-used to me.

Xenix, a Microsoft-funded update to Unix (from AT&T/Bell Labs) added necessary items such as robustness, file and record locking and the ability to run on relatively minimal hardware. My (at that time future) friend, David Ingram, describes sitting on an airplane on a trip from Vancouver to Toronto one day next to a "goggly-eyed kid" who spoke of this new operating system as the next wave for business use of microcomputers. The kid gave him some part numbers for the Radio Shack and David, being somewhat of a computer junkie himself (ask him to recount the amounts he's spent on various systems for his tax business over the years sometime) phoned up the local Radio Shack store in North Vancouver when he got back to order one. "Don't recognize those part number - call head office" was the reply. Tandy head office in Fort Worth Texas said "where did you get those part numbers? We have not released the products yet!" It seems that Bill Gates had jumped the gun on Tandy in talking to David on the plane.

Anyway, shortly after that I found myself in a store full of such computers. Nirvana! Of course selling Radio Shack computers in a town full of government that only purchased IBM products was a less than fulfilling position, but it gave me lots of time to explore this new system and when I left Radio Shack I went out and started writing software for Xenix systems.

Along came an opportunity to first connect me and my customers (including by this time David Ingram) to the internet via Stuart Lynne's Wimsey Information Services ISP, then an opportunity to help him, then join him as the internet got busy. By mid 1993 we were at the forefront in the run up to the internet explosion, running on SCO Unix on several Pentium Pro and Dual Pentium systems. As one of the owners I found myself having to deal with the fall-out of the problems with porn and other problems, and this involved looking at much of the available images and some of the first video available via Usenet News feeds. I needed a fast video workstation.

We couldn't afford the $20,000 that a "real" graphics workstation would cost but at about that time a new open source project by a young Finnish student by the name of Linux Torvalds, called Linux, was starting to get stable enough and get graphics support enough that it was able to give me what I wanted on hardware that cost less than about $5,000, including almost $2,000 for a 19" monitor. Thus I was one of those who took version 0.9.1 of Linux and used it as my every-day workstation. I've had Linux on my desktop for most of the intervening years. In fact until about the middle of 1996 I took pride in the fact that the only item from Microsoft that I used regularly was a DOS boot disk and the hard-disk preparation utility "fdisk" to partition drives to put Unix or Linux operating systems on.

Then, after iStar Internet bought Wimsey in late 1995 I found myself the MIS manager for several hundred people who, depending upon which of the 8 companies they'd come from initially, used any of Windows, Linux/Unix or MAC - so I ended up with all 3 in my office and on my desk; mostly Windows.

I found my time with an enforced Windows setup very frustrating. This was at a time when Windows really was little more than a GUI on top of DOS - not really able to handle more than one thing at once. I pushed and stretched my machine and Windows to the limit - and when I finally got away from iStar pretty much vowed never again.

The problem is that since then I've always had customers who have Windows around for some reason, so I've kept at least something with Windows on it around just to ensure I can deal with it. 

Then I found VMWare - their Workstation product allowed me to run Windows (and other things) under Linux. Fantastic! And hey, I can run several versions at once too! Of course I needed lots of RAM but one thing that Linux does is support lots of RAM - and multiple CPUs too.

So I upgraded my workstation to a dual-processor machine that would take 4 Gigs of RAM - although I only put 2 in it as the price of RAM at the time was more than the processors by quite a bit. I also put 2 video cards into it, one of which was dual-head itself, and had 3 monitors. I've written quite a few times about "the paperless office" and am of the opinion that only if your screen real estate matches our is larger than your physical desk real estate will you have the ability and incentive to use less paper. I used that machine for over 2 years before I felt the need to upgrade. Today my wife Shirley uses this as her workstation. I've moved on by quite a stretch.

My next workstation was a P4 with hyperthreading, almost but not quite a dual-core, with 4 Gigs of RAM and 2 dual-head video cards with 4 monitors. It too lasted me about 2 years and now it sits in the background of my network here as a disk storage system and sometimes video render server. In fact, my daughter-in-law used it last year as a workstation (with only 2 monitors) when she was doing some work with me and fell in love with Linux on it so much that I ended up building her a similar machine to take home with her.

Now we come to my current workstation that I put together just about a year ago. This quad-core AMD with 8 Gigs of RAM has 3 dual-head graphics cards, room for a 4th, and 5 monitors on it. It started out with Fedora Core 9 on it and was quickly updated to 10, then 11. This latest update was to be to FC12 and that's where we come up to date. You see I've spent most of the past 3 days trying to get the multi-monitor system working and run up against a brick wall. It almost works, and I have hopes that the community will come up with the fix over the next while, but at the moment I simply can't wait, so I'm going back to FC11. The problem is that I didn't do what I normally do and simply save the old boot drive and start fresh.

You see since I have many machines around the house as well as systems at customer sites that I administer, I have done some experimenting with the "in place" update facility that has come available in the last few updates (preupdate) and I'd successfully done this in place update on 2 other machines both to test it and to learn the potential for problems. I'd done the "belt and suspenders" on them where I did full copies of the working drive and did the update on the copy, and things went just great.

So I foolishly skipped the backup this time - at least of the operating system - and did the in place update. It didn't finish. It didn't correctly restart. It eventually thought my system was fresh and tried to do a full install. The full install didn't finish. It didn't restart. I tried several different install methods ranging from a USB external DVD, CD boot to network install, and eventually internal CD (didn't have a spare DVD), all of which took time to download and set up (via my spare workstation, hey, I'm not entirely stupid ;) and has so far cost me 3 days of lost productivity.

Such is life - this is how I learn and how I give back to the community. My notes and insights into what did and didn't work, the system's transcripts of the install process and the hardware/software mix I use all go into the development pot and we learn. I just wish I'd done the full OS backup before as now I'm having to re-install FC11 from scratch. I have my various setting files but can't just copy them back as the system is now slightly different for a variety of reasons. Updating hardware at such a time is an obvious thing to do and some of the old hardware has now been used elsewhere. We live and learn.

So... if you've been trying to email me and had messages bounce you'll be glad to know that the settings in the mail server have been changed to accept the fact that it might be offline for more than a day. You'll get notice that the message has not been delivered, but it won't bounce for 7 days now. If I can't fix the system by then I'll put something else in place.

Besides - the weather this past few days has been so wet that what else have I had to do except sit here and try various incantations?

Next week will be better - back to "normal" - whatever that is.

richard