Two quick updates that apply to the title of this particular collection of words I'm calling a blog. Many of you know I am quick to adopt technology at the blink of an eye. However, when it comes to patience, I tend to be selective. Over the past two weeks, this has come into the forefront on two occasions.
First of all, I've been patiently waiting to purchase a new MacBook Pro. I closely follow several Apple-related rumor sites and heard speculation that Apple would be releasing new versions of this line just in time for the shopping season. They were right. On Tuesday, October 24, 2006 Apple announced their new MacBook Pro lines that now included the Intel Core Duo 2. Within 15 minutes of reading this in my news feeds, I had completed my order on Apple's online store. This is the point in the blog where you quit shaking your head and saying 'Damon, your such a geek'. I'll try not to bore you with the details. In general, it's way faster, the display is remarkably brighter, and I'm glad to be done with the PowerPC generation. Oh, did I mention that the MagSafe technology is dope. Get that thing close and wham, it snaps into place. Not only that, but it came bundled with Front Row. Now I can navigate my media using an infrared remote...check out 'Dem Franchize Boyz' below.
Alright, so that is an example of patience, but like I mentioned, I tend to be selective when it comes to patience and technology. I typically want things bigger, better, faster and want them like 10 days ago.
The other night my friend Jason informed me that Ubuntu finally released the new version of their operating system, coded named 'Edgy'. Considering this version had the 2.6.17 kernel and I was having annoying problems with versions prior to that, I was eagerly awaiting this release. To upgrade, or not to upgrade, that was the question.
Jason warned me ahead of time that there were a large number of reports indicating Edgy was a nightmare. I should have probably waited, right? Eh, I was only a few command line keystrokes away from seeing if the rumors were true. Therefore, I kindly disregarded the voice of reason sitting on my shoulder and sided with voice that said, 'Oh why not dude'. This course of action usually results in mayhem for me as I have a history of bad luck with infrastructure-related things.
Rolling the dice, I began the upgrade on two of the four servers. After the first server was done upgrading, I was to say the least, scared. The boot sequence was no longer showing the [ok] messages for each service that was starting. Further reading indicated this was part of the new release, whew.
Luckily, I have since completed the upgrade of all four servers to the 'Edgy' release with little troubles. The only problem I ran into was one with 'courier-imap', which was documented with workarounds in the Ubuntu forums.
Powered by Edgy – As you can see, all four servers are now running the 2.6.17 linux kernel. Hopefully this version of the kernel plays better with SATA drives.
What can I say, I got lucky with the upgrades. Normally, when I roll the dice, the dice respond by slapping me in the face, kicking me when I'm down, and then taking the rest out on my network infrastructure so that I have to spend endless nights rebuilding everything. In this case, selective patience paid off, but who knows what will happen in the future.
