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Posts Tagged ‘Linux’

The most confusing network problem ever!

May 15th, 2007 No comments

I’ve spent the last week with a very very odd networking problem, and all my attempts at figuring it out and fixing it have yielded nothing but more questions than answers.

I first noticed the problem after having taken my network apart because I got a new Rogers VOIP cable box (Rogers Home Phone service) added, and I opted to hook it up myself so I could do a nice wiring job. I got that done and hooked everything back up just the way it was – powered on my firewall/server box, cable modem and router all hooked up just they were before. Things seemed normal until I tried to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and my browser stalled half way trying to load it up – refreshes wouldn’t help much, sometimes it would get a bit further, but it never got to loading the ActiveX part of it. Other sites were working fine though which was really confusing.

I thought maybe Windows XP was pwned or something, so I tried Vista – it worked which led me to think XP was in trouble – so I spent countless hours searching for anything – something – that I thought might be the cause. I tried fixing *everything* from network stacks, registry, hardware, drivers, WSH reinstall – you name it. Nothing worked. Then I noticed file transfers were very slow for uploads through XP and Vista, so I got to tinkering with stuff to figure that out.
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The current state of most Linux distributions sucks!

March 19th, 2007 1 comment

I’m sorry to say, but it’s true. The current state of most of the potentially great Linux distributions is disgusting. I don’t even know if the maintainers of the distributions are aware that they have a problem or not, but they do – and it’s a big one.

I’ve been using Linux for many, many years and I have used quite a few of the various distributions of Linux available over those years and have never been happy with any of them. I started off using Slackware about 9 years ago and just didn’t know enough about Linux back then to be aware of how much of a mess that installation was – but it was bad. After a while of upgrading the system manually (packages referred to grabbing the .tar.gz manually and reading up on how to configure and make the entire thing yourself back then), I was quickly aware of how much crap was on the system that just didn’t need to be there.
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