Fyrk är styrk, or the money and the power
By llauren on May 13, 2005 in english, geek
As one final performance here, i am to oversee the installation of a mail server for MNEC, This is something i haven’t done before, and as such, it is not a small task. An interesting one it is, but by no means simple. We have been fighting for some time to get a test box to install a mail server on and yesterday we got to borrow three P4 desktops to tinker with; one for me and one for each of my two worthy counterparts.I decided to build my box on Ubuntu Linux. The philosophy behind Ubuntu appeals to me, and it is built on Debian. As a last job yesterday, i set wget to download the latest distribution.
Today after lunch and briefing my counterparts, the work begun. It was bye-bye to Windows and hello Ubuntu. First problem was that the poor distribution desperately tried to talk with the update server on the other side of the firewall. It would have been okay if i could have told it to go through the proxy, but the Ubuntu installer does not have such an option, at least not where i could find it, so the wait for apt to time out from its task was rather daunting.
Twice. Because just as the post-installation stuff was about to be ready, the screen saver on my Windows box engaged, and as a reaction, i gave the keyboard in front of me the three finger salute. Not a good idea. The Linux box to which the keyboard was connected took my instructions to the Windows box it wasn’t connected to as a request to boot. In the middle of the final setup steps. Not good.
So i installed Ubuntu again. This time, i saw that there’s a server
directive to give to the install process, which installs just a base system. In glorious text mode. No disturbing X-Windows. Nice, except that this installation also wanted to knock its head agains the firewall for about fifteen minutes.
When we finally were up, i was royally surprised to find that sshd and gcc were not part of the base installation and neither could i find them anywhere on aptitude. I was just about to give in and re-install with Mepis (which powers my (borrowed) laptop) when i realized that i could just apt-get install emacs21, then emacs /etc/apt/sources.list, uncomment the sources on the other side of the proxy, export http_proxy=http://proxy:3128 and apt-get install gcc and apt-get install ssh.
Glory.
Then with a book of helpful pointers in hand, i proceded to wget qmail, dspam, and a bunch of other needed packets.
(Geek factor diminishing from this point on. Normal readers can start here.)
Geeking whas fun, and almost productive, until just before 21, when the power went down. OK, i thought. It’s the god of electricity telling me it’s time to go home. Or rather, to dine.
Took the taxi to Castaway and had a most excellent red wine stew (which incidentially is not very unlike my grandfather’s equally excellent burgundy stew) and a couple of beers with Seppo who walked in when i was almost ready ask for the cheque.
A couple of
On a completely unrelated (side)note, a professor once told us about an American divorce case where the wife wanted to divorce her husband on the grounds that he had come home compleatly pissed when he claimed he’d been out on a few beers
. The whole thing boiled down to what a few
anyting would be, in numerical terms. A few, say, steaks can be no more than three, but a few nails…? Is five nails more than a few? Well…? Is twenty nails more than a few? Well, not if you’re building a house it isn’t. It was juridically decided that a few
must be anywhere between two and ninety-nine, and the grounds for divorce was rejected. Wheter the wife got the divorce on other terms is beyond the scope of this legend.
So, i manage to get home and the porch light at the house i am borrowing is down. I flick the switch a few times, but nothing happens. I check the fuse and it’s OK.Right, so the lamp must be out. I unlock the door and try the light inside. Down as well. But it can’t be a power-out, because the light is on at my neighbour’s place. It must be the bill.
Now in this place, not only the cell phones are pre-paid; also electricity is something you pay in advance. Billing isn’t an established concept here just yet. Just give it a few more years. Luckily, Agnes and Sebastien had left an electricity ticket at the place before they left, so with a light in hand, i scramble for the precious piece of paper and punch the sixteen-digit code in the meter.
USEd, informs the meter, and i express my heart’s discontent in nordic expletitives.
My colleague Paul from work had once told me that the “electricity shop” is open until midnight, so i tell Seppo by text, who i’ve already been venting my frustrations with, to hold his kind offer of driving me to my “other place”. And lo and behold. The electricity department, a service of the state, is truly open at half past eleven in the night.
I am overwhelmed. I whack two twenties on the counter and i’ve got the power.
The walk home is much nicer than anything in the previous twenty minues. Other states should take example. This state surely knows how to provide service for its inhabitants.
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