Network Woes

We had this strange coinsurance at work. We had a power blip yesterday in the evening. Our network and the local boxes all seemed to recover. One lead from the UPS didn't catch and machines lost power. No big deal. We will get it looked at. Yesterday afternoon I noticed I could not get to some parts of our intranet. This morning I rebooted my machine and Firefox would not come up at all. I mean it would make a lock file and sit there doing nothing. No messages and no activity and no ctrl-C. Nothing.

After cussing, and poking around for a half hour I found the messages in the boot system that lockd server was not responding. That is some NFS voodoo service. Everything else was working

I tried to figure what machines were affected. It turns out , only newer RHEL 5.2 boxes were affected. Some 5.1 boxes did not have the trouble. When I poked around in the user folders for Firefox there were some rbf files one of which was labeled localstore.rdf. I'm not sure where the change happened, but it appears that newer machines use more locking and authentication than the old machines did. OpenOffice must use the same locking mechanisms.

It freaks me out how dependent computers have become on networks.  People are buying netbooks by the case and loving it. My phone won't run a hello world without a network. Now the desktops on an integral network blow a gasket every time some locking mechanism trips over a power blip. Great. I guess TVs have always been useless without a network signal.

When you download a Linux OS, it comes with enough to get you booted up and logged on to the net. That is where all the real install files are. They are called live CDs. They are getting smaller every week. The online repositories are getting larger. The one for Ubuntu ended up being 22 gigabytes. I know I downloaded it for use on our internal network.

Windows requires you to get online in order to download updates to all the security software that protects you from being online.