A long and... uh... interesting day. One in which I made a discovery, or maybe it's a re-discovery.
I hate kids.
Well, let me qualify that a little... I hate boy-kids. They never sit still, and are always, always making noise, unless they're getting in trouble, in which case they're quiet.
Unless, of course, they don't really care if they get in trouble or not, because there's nobody around to yell at them.
More network troubles, or rather continuing ones with a twist. The twist was that, at 07:14 this morning, someone really screwed up Karen's machine. In a very strange way. I mean it was screwed up atrangely, I know how they did it... pounding on keys. Before Karen or I got up.
The only outward symptom on the machine was that it would fault explorer every time you tried to open something from it. You could open it and look at the main directory structure, but trying to go anywhere would kill it.
Unfortunately, it has been the most stable machine on the network, and I thought that it still was... but it wasn't, and thinking that it was cost me several hours of frustrated troubleshooting.
And I still haven't got the network going the way that it should be, dammit. I've got three WIN98 machines and two Linux machines on the network, with the cable modem hooked up to my main WIN98 box. If I don't run the internet sharing, I can communicate with everything... but if I load it, the results are spotty, and there is no internet connection sharing at all... it just doesn't work. And it did, dammit, before I left on vacation...
So, after three days of thinking about it and troubleshooting, I've about given up. It's time for one of the Linux boxes to carry their part of the load.
Two ways that I can go... a simple router, which I can run off of a single floppy, thereby wasting most of the resourses of the box... or setting the box up as a server.
The smart thing would be to set it up as a server, since that's really what I want it to be... but the simplicity of the router route (ha!) also has some strong points.
And, of course, there's the possibility of WIN2000, or the WIN2K advanced server... both of which have come to roost on my HD recently.
Ah, what to do, what to do... I've had some time to think now, I think that I will go the Linux server route. Not simple, but better, I hope, than the more complex alternatives that MS offers.
So, today was a day of relative rest. Tyler and I were both limping around like old men, but by the end of the day he had recovered nicely, unlike me.
And it's way too late for me to still be up, and I'm really sleepy, so I should get this up and go to sleep, I guess. Lots of work to do tomorrow after the sun has been up for a while... lots of dirt to move, and muscles to limber up...