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Some days I know that I am truly a brain-damaged idiot. Ever time I try to get something that seems relatively simple (in theory) done, it gets all balled up, convoluted and complicated, and I end up looking like an idiot, and a frustrated one at that. Sometimes it's because I haven't thought too closely about what others have done before me...
I hate flaky downloads, and people who don't think things through. Last week my roomie downloaded the Debian Woody ISO images. She originally started downloading them all by http, and to the main drive, which didn't have the space. Needless to say, this was slow as molasses, and wouldn't have fit anyway (8 ISOs). So I killed 6 of the downloads, and then started them as FTP downloads to other drives. The next day, the 6 finished in the morning, but each of disks 1 and 2 took until the late evening. But at least I got them, and they looked ok... So I burned the CDs.
Yesterday, I tried to use disk one to install with. Guess what? It went fine, until it tried to unpack one particular package, and then aborted - repeatedly. I will give it one more try today, but I've re-downloaded (via FTP, thank you) the ISOs, so I can burn new CDs for the set. Apparently http downloads can often insert extraneous "noise" into the download, and since she was doing the download on the windows side, we couldn't even check the checksums. The file size looked ok, but...
So that's one project slipped again.
I really need to get walked through DNS records and where what belongs and why, and how they interact with mail servers like qmail (which I know nothing about, but my hosting service uses). My references don't really give me a good picture, and I have several sites/domains that needs sane DNS and pointers so people can get mail and web page service. OTOH, once I get it, and do it, it will be a salable skill. Yeah, I already know how to do an A record and CNAME record, but only when it comes to adding a new machine to a network. I haven't done the "map a domain name to a host for web and mail" yet. Bleah.
On the lighter side, I've joined the Callahanians community.
I hate flaky downloads, and people who don't think things through. Last week my roomie downloaded the Debian Woody ISO images. She originally started downloading them all by http, and to the main drive, which didn't have the space. Needless to say, this was slow as molasses, and wouldn't have fit anyway (8 ISOs). So I killed 6 of the downloads, and then started them as FTP downloads to other drives. The next day, the 6 finished in the morning, but each of disks 1 and 2 took until the late evening. But at least I got them, and they looked ok... So I burned the CDs.
Yesterday, I tried to use disk one to install with. Guess what? It went fine, until it tried to unpack one particular package, and then aborted - repeatedly. I will give it one more try today, but I've re-downloaded (via FTP, thank you) the ISOs, so I can burn new CDs for the set. Apparently http downloads can often insert extraneous "noise" into the download, and since she was doing the download on the windows side, we couldn't even check the checksums. The file size looked ok, but...
So that's one project slipped again.
I really need to get walked through DNS records and where what belongs and why, and how they interact with mail servers like qmail (which I know nothing about, but my hosting service uses). My references don't really give me a good picture, and I have several sites/domains that needs sane DNS and pointers so people can get mail and web page service. OTOH, once I get it, and do it, it will be a salable skill. Yeah, I already know how to do an A record and CNAME record, but only when it comes to adding a new machine to a network. I haven't done the "map a domain name to a host for web and mail" yet. Bleah.
On the lighter side, I've joined the Callahanians community.
