Update from my personal hell

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

OK.  I went out and bought Suse 9.0 Professional so I could just 
do the install once with the latest stuff, and maybe the install
will be better or maybe I will wave the dead chicken over it just
right.  

The upshot is that I saw a lot of configuration screens after the reboot
that I did not see before, and lots of stuff just Worked Better.  Not
everything, though.  And not that I'm the kind of geek to say "I told you 
so" (well, not all the time), but almost every problem I had seems to be
caused by too many configuration files controlling the same service.  For
instance, apache was controlled by not only /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, but 
several other files in that directory, at least one in /etc/sysconfig/,
and a Yast module.  I needed to remove one piece of functionality that 
was not only causing me problems but I had no idea what it was (midgard),
and I had to edit no less than six configuration files before Apache would
forget about it and move on.

I have preached many a time about the evils of having multiple files and/or
non-text databases controlling services.  They WILL get out of sync (as 
mine did) and you WILL be screwed.  Another great example of this is 
XFree86.  There are three or four config programs that come with it, and not
only are there two different copies (NOT synchronized) named the same thing
in different directories, but on my Red Hat 7.3 system, both the command and
the config file were named XF86Config!

You know what's really missing though?  A post-install service that would 
keep track of what services are installed that have yet to be configured
and which ones are active and inactive.  And a link to the project's 
website.  Ferinstance, Because I dared try installing courier-imap instead
of uw-imap, there was no post-install or yast configuration for IMAP, and
no indication that it was not configured to start up on 2,3,4,5.

My biggest bitches with the installer are:
- There is no way to get more than a sentence or two on each package during
package selection.  Certainly no way to get a list of files.  This left me
in the dark on what a lot of the packages were.  Any info in the RPM should
be accessible from the installer BEFORE I install it.
- When you go through the normal package selection screen, you are only 
presented a small percentage of the packages, but there's no indication
of that.  You have to just know to go into Packages By Group (or something
like that) to see all the packages.  That's one reason I missed a ton of 
critical stuff the first time.

Biggest compliment:  Back buttons  **THANK YOU** Not rocket science, but
apparently beyond Red Hat's abilities until recently too.

The current state of my machine:

The good:
-Apache is finally rockin' with all 13 domain names
-Postfix is doing the same, plus or minus some minor problems, but I haven't
tried mailman configuration yet.

The bad:
-courier-imap is still not letting me log in through any of the four email
clients I've tried.  This is a BIG DEAL.  I still have to bring up my
mbox files in a text editor to see my email.  At least I can get courier-imap
to run, even if I can't connect to it.
-Despite having my exact video card and monitor in the database, I cannot get
rid of this distortion at the top of the screen- It's sorta like someone took
slivers out of the top of the screen- there are a few thick black lines running
from one side to another right where I need to click on title bar decorations.
-Cut and paste is not working in a consistent way, especially in Konsole where
I need ot the most.

By the way, when I partitioned everything out, I set up swap and /tmp on the
old hard drive so they were on separate spindles.  Well, I wasn't expecting that
disk to start crapping out with increasing frequency.  Fortunately I got the machine
booted eventually so I could repartition the new drive and take the old one out of
service.   Hard to pin that one on Suse though... ;)

I'm willing to do more research before begging for help on courier-imap, but thanks
for all the help I've gotten so far.





--
DDDD   David Kramer         david at thekramers.net       http://thekramers.net
DK KD  
DKK D  $> man woman
DK KD  segmentation fault (core dumped)
DDDD   $>