Pun Salad

Upgrading this server from Fedora Core 4 to 5 went unsmoothly. Sorry if you noticed the long outage.

1. The CDs I burned failed the initial media check. Impossible! A quick check of the Google showed the magic words to type at the boot prompt: linux ide=nodma. This caused the media check to pass and allowed us to proceed.

2. No surprises for the actual upgrade, except that it was verrrrry slllow. I assumed this was due to extra careful error checking, although I have no actual idea. The FC5 install screens are pretty.

3. Finally, we reboot to the upgraded OS. And things look just swell, except …

4. Crap, the network isn't working at all. Output from ifconfig shows that the system thinks the interface is up, but there are a lot of errors on the transmit and receive sides.

5. After dinking around with network configuration tools, I try unplugging the ethernet connector from the NIC, and plugging it back in. Hallelulah, things work again! … for about a minute, then we're back in Suck City.

6. Desperate, I'm thinking there's something wrong with the new network card driver. This is a pretty generic box, a Dell Dimension 4500 with a Davicom chipset ethernet card (CNET Pro200WL). How bad could that be? Nevertheless, I scrounge from our local hardware guru a couple more ethernet cards, one 3Com-based, one Intel-based.

7. Surely if anything's gonna work, the 3Com card will. Nope. If anything, it's worse than the Davicom, because unplugging and plugging doesn't even make it work for a minute.

8. OK, try the Intel card … Yah, we're back now. After about 7 hours of being off the network. Feh.