Of Traffic and Networking...

I haven't been blogging much of late, which undoubtably has improved the traffic numbers for this place. It's pretty tough to tell the difference between really unnoticed and merely very unnoticed, but in the name of masochism we endeavor to do so . If nothing else, the words just written can be filler while I actually think up something worth saying.

I haven't been following the news much in the past week because of the problems I've been encountering while switching to the new PC. I recently decided to augment the old PII here at the manor with a new generation, and it has left me with the problem of moving the old data that I still want to from the old to the new one. The old machine was built before CD burners, and the price of SCSI CD burners managed to dissuade me from putting one in the old box. That left networking them together so I could copy the data I wanted to save to the new machine. Should be easy for a computer guy, right?

Both machines are set up as dual-boot (Windows/Linux). Setting up Windows file sharing between the two actually went pretty well, as Windows XP generated a floppy that set up the old Win98 machine with only modest tweaking. (Did I mention that I don't know anything about networking PCs?) A few grudging points to Microsoft, there. The linux part, to put it euphemistically, was rather more of an adventure. I managed to turn a five minute job for someone who knows what they are doing into a week's comedy of trial and error involving dhcp, nfs, shorewall, and a host of configuration files. The end result is that they talk to each other, but I'm pretty sure I did it wrong... . I now know what is meant by "expert friendly".