Failure @ Office, Successful @ home

This is regarding my transition of OS in both the localities.

Lemme tell you abt the failure first. I've been recently shifted to another project at work. That project needs .net framework. I was using a linux box till last week for all my official purposes.

I knew that mono is compatible with .net which is being developed my Novell and tried installing mono on my machine at office. Its an RHEL 4 box for which the preferred method was to install yum, place the mono repository file under the yum.reposd directory and leave the rest to yum about the mono installation.

Installing yum was a problem. The official yum site has newer versions of yum but has no page which contains the proper method to install yum. I struggled 2 days installing yum when my sys-admin anirudh helped me with using the cent-OS version of yum for mono installation. After an hour of research on that and re-creating the yum RPM for RHEL 4 repository, I successfully installed yum.

Things didnt stop. The actual problem arised here. After placing the mono.repo file under '/etc/yum.reposd' directory, my gateway was blocking yum from downloading the mono RPMs from ftp.novell.com. Oops. To deduce this it took me 1 hour but infortunately the solution was not known to me as my sys-admin refused to unblock all ports. ftp.novell.com was not accessible through FTP. We were able to successfully access the above site through http. After 4 long days of discussion with the network team of sys-admin team, They finally enabled it to know that the port that they are using is different from the usual. (I havent tried much. This is what my sys-admin told me.)

We were not able to download even after enabling the particular site. Anirudh suggested me to try red-carpet to install mono even though I said that its specific to novell. I tried it in front of him where the dependencies for that RPM increased nearly exponentially. We dropped that idea.

We even tried downloading the RPMs seperately ourselves and installing. This didnt work either. Poooooof!

My sys-admin seems to be a good innovative thinker. We have this USB modem from Tata-Indicom for all our laptop users. He suggested that why not we try installing mono though yum with this connection. I agreed.

We faced one more problem here. That modem didnt have linux drivers along with its setup CD. What crap? We checked the tata-indicom site to know only that It has drivers for Windows as well as Mac OS X but not Linux.

We called up the customer care to find out that even they do not know how to make it work on Linux. Isn't Linux popular here? Shit!

They escalated the call and replied that they would send a customer executive to resolve the issue, who came to our office after consulting me on saturday. He didnt knew what the problem was and was just sent with a fake reason to my office. After understanding the problem, even he said that he doesn't know the solution for this problem. He had tackled this once before but in vain.

He said that he would consult his seniors and lemme know the solution. After calling them, they said that they will consult their seniors to which the y replied with "There is a section on Linux in the user manual sent with the CD."

Final hope. We tried even that. i.e.,

1. Login as root.
2. insert the USB modem.
3. run wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf
4. this should detect the modem and alter the afore mentioned conf file.
5. We need to edit the above file (wvdial.conf) to change the phone number, user name as well as password to #777, internet and internet respectively.
6. Add one more line to the file at the end with the entry
stupid mode = 1
(How correct)

7. try wvdial now to check the internet connection.

8. Press ctrl - c to end the connection.

Fortunately the network connection was successful but was damn slow. slower than the dial up connection. I waited 30 minutes to connect to google but in vain.

This made us dropout even this idea.

Frustrated with my activities since two weeks, my manager was angry with my performance. He asked me to not waste any time installing mono and wanted me to go with a dual boot.

Now, never in my office PC have I installed Windows. I hated that. I always wanted to work with LINUX. This seemed like failure to me (Though I spent two full days on the name of installation of Windows, Linux and its utilities, good reason to enjoy atleast on these causes)

Due process, I lost all my official mails sent throughout 2.8 years of my career here. My manager is on leave. Dunno what will be his reaction on this... :(

Altogether this constitutes to what I call failure at office.

Now, lemme quickly finish this post as to why I'm successful at home. All at home were used to windows at home. I had downloaded the brand new Fedora 9 (as of today, this is the latest version of Fedora, nicknamed Sulphur). Today I was able to solve the major problem of network connection as I've explained it here.

I no longer have windows installed on my PC. Its fast, error free to a large extent and virus, worm free which makes me like Linux more for the moment being. There are lot many to mention it here.

Hope I'll find something better at office and good things continue at home.