3 posts tagged “linux”

In case anybody is wondering, here is a write-up on why I finally abandoned Linux on the desktop.  I hope that people find it helpful, but really it's about my own choice and evolution in life and I don't really recommend switching unless you find yourself in the same situation.

First off, a word about what I would call my evolution.  In the past I ran linux mostly because I enjoyed the tinkering aspect and tuning.  In a nearly polar opposite of the way I like cars, I liked linux because I could hack on things.  When I bought my first laptop, back in 1998, I immediately threw linux on it and proceeded to hack on a video card driver to get it working.

I spent about 4 days of near constant hacking learning the internals of how everything works, and got a working driver.  This was one of my first forays into open source, as I was hacking away in my isolation chamber I missed that the maintainer of the driver duplicated the work I did.  As expected, his work was better, faster, stronger, etc.  The cool thing is that it worked.  I made it work, even though it was just an exercise.  I made it work.

Fast forward into my current situation.  I work.  I have a son to play with, a wife to be with, a million dreams and less time than ever before. I want to be productive, which means that a simple choice had to be made.

I had to decide to either be more productive, or settle for not meeting my goals.

Decisions like these are hard to make, because I really do enjoy the tinkering aspect of things.  The reality of it is that I just don't have the time, and I found myself getting frustrated because of the constant distractions that come with running Linux.  Perhaps for newer users it is less of an issue, but I've been using Linux for far too long to just let things be.  It's an obsession that I can't cure with self control, I suppose.

When I bought my MacBook Pro, I was really expecting to be frustrated with having to change my work flow to work in the environment, rather than change my environment to suit my work flow.  Surprisingly to me, but not to the readers of this since I'm talking about a switch, I found myself getting more done and in less time.  This is even doing things that I wouldn't otherwise go on a blitz of tinkering.

So that's the primary reason.  The secondary reason boils down to Firefox 3 and Ubuntu.  Towards the end of my Linux on the Desktop tenure, I was running Ubuntu.  I was happy with Ubuntu, and it worked.  Mostly.  I still had to edit my grub config.  I had to modify sources.  I had to do other minor things, but I tinkered less and things generally worked.

Except Firefox.

Firefox 3 was constantly giving me issues.  If it was just on my desktop I wouldn't have cared much, and blamed Firefox.  This just happened to coincide with me doing nightly code sprints on my mac, so I was able to do direct comparisons between the two.  I even went so far as to completely remove everything Firefox related on Linux and rebuild everything.  Back to tinkering, and this was a good two hours of time spent.

I still had issues.  Between it crashing constantly (2-3 times a day), and then toolbar icons repeatedly disappearing it was unbearable.  It was frustrating, and I was unhappy.  The last straw was that I rather suddenly ceased the ability to click on the (remarkably stupid) "Confirm Security Exception" button after the "Are you sure you wish to add an exception" dialog (no, the one after the "Add a security exception" page, and afterr you load the certificate).

Even using Vox became unbearable on Linux with FF3, because typing in the rich text editor would lag so badly that I couldn't see what I was typing and I just was fed up with it.

Now I'm typing this on OS X, using Firefox 3, with no lag and I have Safari to compare with and the Remote Desktop client over to Vista works like a champ.  I'm getting more done, and can't really tinker unless I go heavy into code.  The desire may still be there, but it's easily squelched because I honestly feel like I shouldn't mess with things.  Besides, for the most part, they all work (my keyboard is a different story, many of the keystrokes are very uncomfortable... I'll write on that later)

[Note: I wrote this while doing an svk sync of DBIx::Class, which is done so now I'm ending it]

But then... I've been struggling for like 3 months to figure out which ebuild contains "/usr/share/dict/words" every time I setup a new VPS or minimal gentoo server.

miscfiles.

Damnit.  My google-fu failed me on that for way too long.

Even though I have several servers that are being hosted, I always have found immense value in a little low powered box sitting on a separate network, preferably far enough away from my production servers, so that I can run some outside-looking-in tests.

With the popularity of "User Mode Linux" and virtualization, having these boxes becomes very cost effective.  On the order of $20 a month, to have a box you can run some monitoring software on and log in to run various tests and such.  Perfect.

Well, finding a good VPS provider is like finding a good provider for any other service.  There are plenty of those who pay more money for marketing than they do for brains, and probably have one or two skilled people who are keeping the ship afloat, while they aggressively pursue world domination without a thought to increasing their core business.  For the most part, this business model works flawlessly.  You can cater to the 80% of the customers who simply want a website, but don't really know enough to realize that a shared hosting provider is a cheaper way of doing it.  But that's fine, the 80% are great.

I'm not the 80%, I suppose.  I expect to be able to use a virtualized server much the same way I would use a colocated server.  I'm not going to spam, harass, send warez or the myriad of other problems most hosting companies have to deal with.  I'm going to use it as a server.  Since that's what I have, a virtual private server.  Not a shared webhosting arrangement.

For the past while (perhaps 7 or 8 months) I've been using VPSLand.com as a VPS.  They were pretty reasonable.  Good uptime, no issues, really.  Quick turn around time to get things up and running, and I was pleased.

Well, up until it became time to use it as an actual server and not a simple webhost/email gateway.  The SSH connections timeout.  Hmm... that's annoying.  It's not from sshd configuration, either it seems.  It looks like they simply drop connections they deem inactive.  That is horribly irritating, because I don't want my connections to time out after a 15 minute break.

Then comes the next step, IRC.  It's nice to be able to launch a screen session and irssi so nothing gets missed.  But... you can't from VPSLand, they have vague terminology about IRC being prohibited.

I figured that it was likely because they had some issues with people running file serve bots, or some other issue.  I email their support team thinking that they just don't like the bots and such, or they were talking about running an IRC server.  Not being one to try things without asking, I sent an email requesting clarification.  I get a great response back.  I love it when support staff act as if they're being paid for brevity:

"We do not support IRC, port used for IRC is blocked on server."

What now?  You do not support IRC.  I'm not asking anybody to support IRC, I'm asking if the vague "IRC is BAD" terminology in the AUP is talking about a server or client, and wondering if I can run an IRC client.  So, I'm thinking at this point he doesn't get that I'm talking about an IRC client.  But, blocking an outbound connection still seems odd.  So, I do some poking and sure enough 6667 is blocked.  Stupid.

So, I further inquire:

"Could you explain the reasoning as to why I cannot make an outbound connection to use an IRC client?"

And, Greg helpfully responds in his normal brief tone:

"Yes, it's almost certain to be victim to a irc dos attack, flood, etc. IRC allowed on a network will bring the network to a halt. It's too impactful on all other customers almost NO provider allows it."

So, I have a technical support person at a VPS provider who is telling me that my IRC client is certain to be the victim of an attack.  A client. 

Priceless.

So, now it's pretty obvious that he really doesn't understand IRC client vs. server distinction.  I'm guessing he is the same type of person who thinks that you can't run Linux as a desktop and KDE is simply a layer on top of Windows.  In other words, using the same tone as Helpful Greg, "hes dumb".

Well, in less than 12 hours I have a linode.com VPS setup, after hopping into their IRC network that they use for support (*gasp* the impactful ness of it!) and verifying they are actually sane.  Just for fun I samples quite a few other VPS providers AUP and nearly all of them prohibit IRC servers, but only prohibit IRC clients for illicit purposes.  In fact, I could only find one that clearly said "no" to IRC clients.

So, thanks for the chuckle VPSLand.com -- you've entered the ranks of companies whom I ridicule.  I feel bad for the guys who are actually making it work, because the support team is undoing the work.  The biggest thing that customer support reps need to learn is "if you don't know, ask someone who does."  Nothing irks a customer more than a dumbass support rep who is condescending and obviously misunderstanding the issue.