Coders Edge

I've still been very busy

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March 3, 2013

Grub gets broken, I fix it

Today I had to fix a grub2 install, which was a first. I have had to do grub before, because, of course, grub has been around forever. First time with grub2. It all came about because of the fedup upgrade. I think that the name 'fedup' is a subtle message from the fedora community. Why would they name their horrer 'fedup' (an upgrade process that clearly does not perform well).

For some reason, and I am not sure why (I think it was permissions) the automatic thing that is supposed to have happened when the kernel upgraded did not work for grub2! And so I was running a configuration file that was two months old and I never picked up the new kernels. My fault for not checking things more thuroughly. It was 'my fault' in that I did have to do things with grub.cfg (utilizing grub2.mkconfig). The output of that utility produced files that still included fedup! I investigated by looking in my yumlist file, a file that I create with the following command:

sudo yum list > ~/yumlist

I sometimes put a time code on that so I can keep older ones around. No need to do that. The yum list showed me that the fedup kernel was still install. I used yum remove to get rid of that. The grub2.mkconfig output still showed me two fedup items:

initramfs-fedup.img

vmlinuz-fedup

These were auto-discovered down in /boot. I merely went in and hand deleted them. If you don't know how to do that then you are not expert enough to perform the operation without thinking about it for a while. Deleteing images from a boot partition can be a disasterous thing to do. If you need to do such a thing, delete stuff from /boot, then you need to make sure that you have the privileges to do that. If you don't know that means then you have more learning to do about system administration.

In my case I was able to get over to the machine by ssh from another machine. If I had been unable to do that I would have been able to create a rescue CD and boot from that. It is fairly unusual these days to have to go at such lengths to make things work. I am used to it, though. I have been running fedora and Redhat for over ten years now, faithfully being at the bleeding edge of all of their changes, living through the madness where various versions of gui managers were redone and made almost useless. Or ruined never to work again (not fedora's fault).

Is fedup the last straw? Maybe it is time for me to tap into their message stream and actually become a beta tester for them so that the disasters that I live through can be come information for them to make the product better.

But, as with many things in open source, it is often the case the there are people who want to take a project private and so reap great benefits from awesome code. We see it over and over now adays: the business model of the eager beaver true believer not being paid, some friend who is the right stuff in the eyes of those with copious cash and . . . they take it all 'as belonging to us.'

In anycase: grub2 is an easy thing to fix if it is broken. If you have such a problem yourself please contact me. My fees are very reasonable and right in line with what other people charge. Have no fear. Your system is probably just fine.

If you do have boot problems it is very important to recognize that writing over critical data is always a bad idea and almost always unnecessary. So do not do that! Call in an expert and let us help you. Click here for contact information.

I'm looking.

Click here to find out more about how you can contract for system administration services.

March 3, 2013

PS: the latest copy of my resume is this web site. If you don't know that when you call me you didn't read far enough down the page! I'll forgive you for it and I won't bring it up, either.

Some say that style can be removed from content. On this site I recognized that it was important to be able to 'inline' the styles. And now that I fully understand the JQuery way of doing things, and am on board the 'backbone's and other software creatures, I feel fully vindicated.

There is a basic rule of software: things need to work and behave reasonable. And software shouldn't have 'temper tantrums'. If it's chicken with your head cut off time at the software slave shop, and some rude and mean grub destroys all of the serenity then . . . you really need to spend more time on your prayer mat and a little less time reading 'high-finance, middlemanager heros' comic books (put out by the brainwash institute; lol). When software is a crisis then the people involved don't get it. It's an idiomatic phrase and if you have to ask me what don't get it means, and are looking for an object to apply to the pronoun it, stop it. It is a way of indicting that the situation with people who are like that is that the competent person would best step aside from such a scene.

Office 'shananagins' are often the reason that things fail in this world. The nests are feathered, people need to be 'indespensible'. They engineer confusion. They try to code themself a job for life. I never did that. Never. Never tried to hide anything that I did. Never obfuscated code. Always shared all of my work with everyone. Often times handed over hours of notes to a Tech Writer and let the tech writer use the stuff as it is supposed to be used. And so, what does that mean? It means that I always walked away from a job happily imagining that my time there would be stuff of my great noveletic exploits. And all of my software work would be just an 'oh, ya' foot note. But, alas, I haven't worked lately on other people's stuff. And I've been truculent about the need for respect in all ways, which means that some kinds of jobs become hard to find.

Make work jobs have never been of interest to me. I like to have my hands in real things, actual metal or plastic parts are a great aspect to working in a factory floor environment. And I especially enjoy working with the bright minds who didn't go to college becuase of their Harley Riding truculence, competence, handi-man demeaner, these are the kids that go to work and shine without degrees. They have skills and a trade and they show up every day. They are the indespensible part of any sane opperation: the local people who will be hanging around in town weather this factory is here or not, the bedrock of the world: hardworking people.

Competence means that you choose the right people to get the job done. You delegate the tasks to the ones suited to shine the warm light of hardwork and well-thought through methodologies to dry up all of the floods that some people like to create. And a competent person doesn't make any floods himself (herself). That person just walks away when the situation is over. There is no need for feelings or emotions or displays of trying to prove one's self. If you hire a plumber you don't need have them prove it to you first, do you?

There is this horrible commerical that is running now that has a very sad message to give out to the world. It's that there is this hardworking guy who is a plumber sitting on some other guys floor and fixing his pipes for him and the other guy is all verklemtzed because the guy, the plumper guy, was also the accountant that did his taxes earlier in the week. And the imagined wife is there tooo and they give their glances between each other ss if they can talk back and forth, appauled that a plumber could also be a tax accountant. Why? Why can't a plumber be a tax accountant? Or a street sweeper could be a nuclear engineer. Or a random guy on the train could be a virtuoso guitar player. And he also grows show-piece roses. Why not? Anyone can learn aall kinds of different trades and that ought to be celebrated, not scoffed at and jeered at.

And so, when faced with hiring managers who have the poison additude of people are stuck in their meager cast, and can not see that real emergence of a diverse world means the acceptance of those kinds of people who really do have the capacity to learn and do many many things. The plumber is also a Navy Seal. The CEO is an expert lineman. All kinds of exceptional people are out there. You find them sitting on the floor in a kitchen fixing pipes for those who can not. Then they get up, put on a smile, and go back to their mansion.

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