HF archive site going down for OS upgrade

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It appears that we are back up.  What a trial!  The upgrade from Linux
1.2.8 to Linux 2.0.0 has been a major ordeal.  It was all complicated
beyond belief by the fact that the Linux development community
switched from a.out binaries to elf binaries.  This was really a GOOD
THING, and was precipitated by the FSF gcc no longer supporting a.out
as the standard format, but elf instead.  

But the elf libraries are all different from the a.out binaries, and
if you support both formats (I had to in order to run old programs
without rebuilding everything) the way Linux tells what lib files to
load is determined by a configuration file that gives search paths and
search orders.  You can't just restore you old files from backup tape,
because the search order will grab the wrong shared object modules and
nothing will work anymore.  

I built the system about a dozen times (at least it seemd that many)
before I got the right combination of what to restore and what not to
restore.  After I had a reasonable configurations that would boot and
run, I fought with my X server.  The X server for my weird display
setup here no longer works as distributed.  I eventually just gave up
and restored my saved server from 1.2.8 and it worked, so I still
don't know what the matter was, but at least it works.

Then I had to get sendmail working.  A mailing list archive site is
not much good without mail service!  Finally, I had to get the cron
tables all set up so that everything would trigger automatically like
it should.  I am still waiting to see if the jobs to update the
mailing list archives will start.  (The system has been up less than
an hour.)

I then had to get the web server back up.  That was actually pretty
easy.  I just needed to make a single symbolic link that did not get
restored from the backup tape.  People are already hitting the
website. 

Finally, I need to rebuild the mgetty/vgetty modem support package and
configure it properly for my setup.  I have 3 modemd on this machine,
and they are all different.  One is for the internet SLIP link, and it
works now, but the other 2 are for dial-in/out lines, with one of them
supporting voicemail.  Voicemail never has worked properly here yet.

The old adage still applies: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  In my
case, eli.wariat.org was running out of sockets under Linux 1.2.8, and
the upgrade to Linux 2.0.0 promises to fix that.  We shall see...

BTW as part of the upgrade, I not only installed Linux 2.0.0, but I
also installed an 8x CD-ROM drive, an 8 GB DAT Tape drive, and upped
the RAM from 32 MB to 128 MB.  I wanted to up the cache from 256 KB to
512 KB, but the parts are backordered.  I also switched the modem
linking me to the internet from 14.4 KBPS to 28.8 KBPS.  Anyway, this
should all contribute to a somewhat peppier system here.  Let me know
if you notice any difference.

-- 
--------  "And there came a writing to him from Elijah"  [2Ch 21:12]  --------
Robert Jay Brown III  rj@eli.wariat.org  http://eli.wariat.org  1 847 705-0424
Elijah Laboratories Inc.;  37 South Greenwood Avenue;  Palatine, IL 60067-6328
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