Saturday 12 January 2013

Chronic Misadventures

So I had decided to get an Arch server set up on an old tower to experiment with git, Apache, php, MySQL, among other things. I'm doing this on another Arch box so as not to clutter my Arch box installed on my laptop. It was also to re-familiarise myself with the Arch install process for when I start working on my Arch presentation for the Linux and Android Club.

I go ahead and get my old tower dusted off and plug everything back in but it doesn't want to boot. After an hour of fiddling around with parts and plugs and mix-and-matching components from two different towers I finally get the thing booting.

So after stumbling my way through it for an hour, I got Arch installed and configured. This was much much better then last time I installed Arch and I didn't use the guides. I get Arch installed and configured. I run the GRUB installer and get GRUB configured. I reboot and GRUB is now hanging... why?!?! I pop the installer back in, arch-chroot back into my fresh install and for some reason the linux.img and initramfs.img had gotten wiped by the GRUB install - mkinitcpio -p linux failing horribly was my clue >> . Reinstall Linux - too tired at this point to create the linux.img manually, rerun the GRUB config script - it finds the linux.img, success! and reboot. Huzzah! Its working.

Fast forward a couple hours later, OpenSSH is configured and I get my SSH key set up, everything is running smoothly. Reboot the server and switch back to Windows on my Laptop. SSH isn't working any more *scratch scratch*, 'Connection Refused' CentOS is telling me, 'Connection Terminated' PuTTY is telling me. Turns out systemd had forgotten to enable and start dhcpcd, ugh, took me twenty minutes to figure that out and only because I tried running pacman to install the internet utilities package.

It's now dinner time, I'm enjoying my meal and catching up on some TV on my laptop. I go to change the volume and knock over my tiny glass. SPLASH! it gets all over my keyboard, I turn my laptop off and upside down and let it drain. I check back a while later and I've short circuited my keyboard, yay! So now I sit here typing on a temporary rubber/soft-touch keyboard with a big hole in my laptop case where the keyboard goes.

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