For months now I’ve not been able to get the VMware Server web interface working. At various points I’ve tried to debug it, looking in the log files, commenting various bits of the startup script out, running httpd directly, etc.

Turns out the startup script just runs in the wrong shell for Ubuntu. The default shell is /bin/sh, if this is changed to /bin/bash then every thing pops into life all of a sudden.

It’s always the small things.

And then 5 seconds later I yanked the power cord from my server. Waited 10 seconds and put the cord back in. The boot screen came on and I yanked the power cord again. At least now I knew that the motherboard and CPU weren’t dead.

As luck would have it I happened to have a ‘spare’ power supply so I put that in the server and booted back up. After the disks had checked them selves the server is now backup and running as before. Interestingly enough this power supply runs cooler than the previous – if the onboard temperature monitor is anything to go by.

Anyone for a dead power supply, thought not.

I asked Mum to e-mail a file over to me this morning so that I can have a look at why she can’t open it. She e-mails it to my Freeserve address, 2 hours later I still hadn’t got it.

She e-mails it again, this time to my tuxx.org.uk account (I’m not putting the e-mail address here for obvious spam reasons). 30 seconds later I have the e-mail and attached file, so I know my e-mail system is working fine. After sorting out the problem with the file I investigate why my Freeserve address isn’t working. I can’t log in to the web mail system which is my usual test. Not good.

A little history is needed at this point. Freeserve was the first ISP in the UK to give out accounts that didn’t need a credit card and monthly payments, instead you just signed up using a CD and then dialed up a number. They got the money from the share of the phone call cost. The e-mail address was yours for life, so long as you dialed up every 90 days. If you didn’t dial in for 90 days your accounts was suspended and you had to ring to get it reactivated. If you didn’t reactivate your account then after a year it was deleted Their way of keeping the system fairly clean I guess.

I registered for an account around 1998 and started to use it. When living at home it wasn’t a problem to dial up every 90 days or less. When I went to university 4 years later I was no longer able to dial in every 90 days as there wasn’t a telephone line in my room. Instead I discovered that on the Freeserve web site I could use the option to “download the settings for a new pc” and this would keep the account activated at no cost.

Time moved on and even though I had new e-mail addresses I still kept my Freeserve address going since it was associated with a fair few systems. At the same time Freeserve was also bought, sold and renamed and today is now know as Orange. Orange seem to be more on the ball and having a bit of a clean out, when I tried to reactivate my account on the web site it no longer keeps the e-mail going. Even when I dial up it doesn’t reset the e-mail so that I can download them.

Hence forth from today I will no longer get e-mail sent to my Freeserve address. Having slowly moved all the important stuff over to the tuxx.org.uk account I’m not actually that bothered, I had always planned to do it in April anyway (one year from when I registered tuxx.org.uk). Its just happened sooner that I planned.

My spam system will certainly be gratefull, after 7 years of use the number is spam I was getting to the Freeserve account was considerable.

It’s not far off 5 months since I started my first job out of university. It’s not my first job working in the real world, I did the work placement in school year 10 (14/15 years old). In 6th form I did a small placement in preference to extra activities classes. Half of my summer holiday between first and second years at university was in the middle east doing IT work. Then of course there was the year in industry as part of my degree.

That doesn’t mean that the first 5 months of my new job have been easy. I’ve made mistakes, some from lack of experience, some from tiredness (there was a period when I worked 6 days a week not long after I first started) and some mistakes from just not knowing the systems that are in place. But gradually I’m getting there. It doesn’t help that the number of people in the IT department has gone from 5 to 3, and 2 out of that 3 are new to the company with the person who designed and wrote most of the system no longer employed here.

However I’m now at the point where my boss let me have the keys to one off our offices over the weekend so that I could do some essential out of hours work. Yesterday I felt sufficiently confident of my knowledge of the system and database to be able to reset some data so that it could be reprocessed today – but not before making a backup of the database

So what have I learnt. Well I now have a much better practical understanding of phone systems, a better idea of MS SQL (the administration of), DFS (Distributed File Systems) and WSUS (windows updates for companies) is now something that I’ve implemented and/or supported. And that some times it’s better to let your boss have his way when you know you are in the right (they don’t teach stuff like that at university ).

I’m now well and truly at the university of life.