Learning

Learned yesterday that when swapping drives around in Linux machines, you have to be aware of the date in the BIOS. I had a computer that I was using to make images and another drive trying to boot the image. The boot machine had the date changed for tolerance testing. When you change the date and boot the computer, things work fine because the drive shutdown date lines up. However, when you put in a drive where the date of the shutdown was a month or year in the future, the system blows a gasket. It took me a minute to figure out what happened and a couple more to remember how to change the linux date from the command line.

This is one of those things that IT people come across all the time. There are simply too many to document. Fortunately, the error I got was descriptive enough to tell me what was happening. It took me another minute to digest that error message. You have to consider the state of the machine when the error occurred.

This is a simple fix. Most things that go wrong have a simple fix. The trouble is identifying the correct simple fix without making things worse in the process of diagnosing. Compounding the problem with erroneous commands and frustrated swings of a sledge hammer happens far too often. I should blog those stories. They are far more interesting than when things work.

The toolbox grows over the years. Some people put things up on blogs. Some folks manage to write tech books. Me, I complain in whatever medium will tolerate it.