Now the Illiad and then the Odyssey.
I've been disconnected from the internet since Friday night. Ravi asked why I had two network cards. So, I pulled out one of them, and plugged into the onboard ethernet. I rebooted and XP was now disconnected. Rather than go back through all the steps to reconfigure the network connections, i shutdown. Then I put the IP supplied card back in. Rebooted. No connection. I struggled for awhile and got pissed off. I had no idea what was wrong.
But now I was really stuck. Ubuntu and XP were on one drive, FreeBSD on another. The only OS that had a proven connection was XP and it didn't work. So, I put in the XP install disk, figuring I could just do a complete reinstall. Set-up starts and then the screen freezes at the critical point where you commit to install, restore, or quit. Nothing. No reaction from any keyboard, not enter, not R not F2---the three choices.
Okay, screw XP. I got back to Ubuntu and even worse nightmares. Only one card is coming up and it's the on-board card I am not using. WTF! Finally around three I go to bed. Next morning as I am set to switch drives to FreeBSD, by switching drive plugs on the motherboard so FreeBSD comes up as the first bootable disk, I see that the IP ethernet card isn't fully seated into its slot. Wow.
Push it in tight. Now go back and start over with Ubuntu. All Saturday and all Sunday I struggle with all three OSs, trying to get any of them to connect. Nada.
Buy a Mac is screaming in my brain. I had an old Mac laptop for a few months, but I am sorry to admit, I killed it the same night I threw my tv out, over seeing Dick Cheney tell Obama he was endangering national security by failing to torture random suspects caught in the dragnets in Iraq, Afghanistan and god knows where else. It was a bad night at Chuck's place. Had to explain to the cop why I was acting crazy and scaring the neighbors. Thank god the cop knew me and I knew him. Very likely I would have taken the Louis Gates walk downtown for the night--had we not known each other. He black, me white. He told me to go down and clean up, and apologize to the nervous neighbor. I hope to meet him again on any dark street.
Okay, so finally this afternoon I got the guts up to call my IP. It's one guy and a bunch of servers. Mike D knows XP, Ubuntu, and the system I usually connect to is his FreeBSD server. He walks me through everything on Ubuntu, over and over. Finally he tells me to take out the card he sent me.
Okay done. Now we go back over every detail. Still same problem or some as yet unknow problem. He is watching my activity on his end. He can see my computer. I should be able to ping him, but I get `host unreachable'.
He tells me to go to the /etc/network/interfaces file where we have been playing around with the two ethernet connections eth0, and eth1. Now here is the crux. Both of us think eth0 is the on-board card because 0 is the usual precedent to 1. But the only card connected is what we thought was the on-board card, eth0. But that doesn't work. Mike realizes that the card numbering is backward. The on-board card is actually eth1, not eth0. So he tells me to re-write the <interfaces> file for eth1. I do.
Minutes later I connect to the internet everything works.
Do you see it?
This is truly beautiful. The eth0 is a device driver and the eth1 is also a device driver. The zero and the one are not sequencial. They are simply different device driver names and do not correspond to the first or second card found in the boot process! In our mistaken logical mind, we both thought 0 was the first card found, which would be on-board, and (1) would be the second card found in a PCI slot. So first card -> 0, second card -> 1. But that wasn't what was going on.
First card maps to its identified device name ethX, second card maps to its identified device name ethY, or rl0 or em1 or whatever the second card is. The names eth, rl, em, refer to the particular brand name chip set on the card.
So there were two problems. First problem was Ubuntu and the GNU network GUI that writes the /etc/interface file, but doesn't erase former entries and completely re-write the file. The next problem was the device driver naming convention that was confusing because eth1 and eth0 are just different drivers and have nothing to do with sequencial order.
Now, to give others a reason why you may want to work on a Ubuntu (other Linux) or FreeBSD box rather than a Mac or PC windows system. It should be obvious that I could never have worked out the above problem on anything other than a Linux or BSD system. Windows simply doesn't have the administrative tools to do the job, unless you buy the big version, plus the maintanence contract, which means thousands and thousands of dollars. Mac has the tools via OS X xterm, but doesn't allow the direct rewrite of the protected system files that compose the administrative interface.
The simple answer as to why(?) is something like Ubuntu or FreeBSD worth it is, if you fuck up, or if you have a slightly off beat combination of hardware and internet connect combination in the Mac and PC world, well if it works fine. If it doesn't you are fucked. And this fuckedness forces you to conform. Conform means buy a Dell shit box or nice but overpriced Mac and some jackenoff internet provider with mega bucks that sucks you dry just to work the way its-supposed-to.
I also have to give enormous credit to Mike D at rawbw.com for his patience and care. A couple of dollars extra a month to an independent IP provider was certainly worth every penny when the chips were down. I was so gratefull for his several hours of help, I offered flowers, a gift, something extra on the bill. He graceously said no and laughed. That's beauty, and it is hard to find.
The above is yet another reason to support alternatives to the vast commercial machine we all struggle with. I got maybe half a dozen offlist responses that were all very, very helpful. People knew what was going on and gave detailed methods to cure the problem. Where do you get that kind of help in the XP or Mac world (?)---don't give me a link. The answer is you don't--not by people as knowledgeable as the people who wrote me. I followed them all, until I killed my own connection. Whatever the outcome, I was always learning.
Some examples follow.
Matt wrote ``The advantage of a Linux based system is that in adddition to everything a Mac or Windows system can do, I can do things that are only limited to my ability...''
Absolutely, god damned right. This in combination with my own problem set is completely true. You will learn nothing on XP or OS X. You will learn everything on BSD or Linux. The latter were designed as learning tools.
Who cares? I do. I want to be able to command the technology I depend on for my speech, for my life, for my being-in-the-world. I decided long ago, I would not be pushed around by some fancy sounding bullshit: not by technology, not by philosophy, not by mathematics, not by science, not by political propaganda, not by the ART board, not by my own ignorance. Total revolt everywhere always---which means in some weird way, humility to always learn as a little boy learns: punishment first (take your slap), memorize, figure, fiddle with pencil, wonder off with eyes glazed looking into the abyss. Very strange. Try Ionesco The Lesson.
Fellow travellers.
Dwayne writes, ``Chuck's problems --- which makes Ubuntu look like hell... are ...due to the age of the version he's running, the way he's configured it and ....the fact that he's a two fisted, roll up your sleeves, take the tough road old bird who came of age in the early atomic age... It's really not that hard anymore...''
I certainly hope so. Cause the next step is getting the current version and going through (not going through) these issues all over again. Here's the knob of it. DHCP with my IP is done with a stand alone router, because old rawbw does not have a DHCP connect. I could change IP providers. But as I saw today, Mike will take the time in his own roll up your sleeves way. There is something really cool about that. I learned a lot today.
BTW, I like the idea of rolling up my sleeves in the age of atomics. I am a backyard mechanic. I take the peasant attitude (from Asia to Latin America, there ain't nothing I can't fix...). I think I have to be that way for survival reasons. This gets deep into Road Warrior stuff. And it gets into difficult philosophy. Just meditate on the idea that I was thinking in 0 -> 1, and it was only an X, not X issue.
I don't mind the difficulty as long as it is solvable. And I don't think that Ubuntu sucks.
I think the folks at GNU need to be more careful in the way they conceive their code. The whole concept of creating an GUI interface to a file to rewrite it for user convienence has problems. How can a simple edit file tell what to keep and what to delete?
In any event there are definite advantages to DHCP as an improvement to the old backyard mechanic way of struggling with /etc/rc.conf and pondering the details of IP fixed addresses and their heirarchies. The crazy thing is that if I had an IP who did supply a DHCP interface, then the `automatic' configurations in XP, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu probably would work out of the box.
Now I am starting the first few pages of Badiou's Number and Numbers. Different thread...
CG