[NCLUG] faith in linux

[paul hansen]

Okay, I have to publicly repent. I suffered from a lack of faith in our
great OS yesterday and I paid the price.

I got my cable modem yesterday afternoon. The tech took one look at my hub
and machines scattered around the house, and upon hearing the work Linux
he handed me the modem and said, "Good luck, you are on your own." That
was cool with me. I'm a cocky linux user.

But then, a couple of hours later when my two-year-old was distracted
enough to allow me to "play", I looked over at my dual-boot. I thought
about the experiences we all heard about two weeks ago . . . ATT not
activating the connection and not being responsive until it was
demonstrated via windoze. Ah hell, I thought, I might as well test it on
windows first. It seemed so easy . . . stick the cd in . . .click a couple
of times . . . give it a machine name . . .watch the test screen come up
. . .failure, failure, failure. After a couple hours of pulling my hair
out over NT (dhcp, static . . .everything I could think of), I looked at
my wife and said, "Oh man, this is going to be a nightmare. I don't think
I have a conneciton."

BUT then I decided to test one of my linux clients. In less than five
minutes I had a hot connection to the Internet -- (it would have taken
less than five min to config but I had to boot single to turn off NIS and
NFS). It took another ten minutes to throw a 2nd network adapter into my
server and get it configured as the gateway. In less than 20 minutes my
whole network was working perfectly. I really should have known better.

Linux is soooo cool.