BOLVERK – Tim's Lousy Blog

So here I sit trying to make a Fedora Core 5 virtual machine, VMware Workstation in my case. Yes, this is what I do for fun…call it pathetic and I’ll kick your ass!

Onward, the installation of Fedora Core failed to recognize the VMware virtual SCSI disk. Solution is as follows:
1) At the warning prompt select “Add Additional Drivers”
2) A dialog will appears that will list the current devices, select “Add Device”
3) Select “BusLogic MultiMaster SCSI” Driver
4) Continue on to a successfull Fedora Core VM installation

I recently ran across a mysql database I needed to do some work on only the root password didn’t seem to be recorded anywhere. On goes the hunt for password recovery solutions and here is what I found that did the trick.

# /etc/init.d/mysql stop
# mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables &
# mysql -u root
mysql> use mysql;
mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD(“NEW-ROOT-PASSWORD”) where User=’root’;
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit
# /etc/init.d/mysql stop
# /etc/init.d/mysql start
# mysql -u root -p

Truely funny comment from Tom Limoncelli as seen in Google video

“I’m always seeing advertisement, that say, ya know, ‘get out of that old, boring routine’. I’d like to get into that old, boring routine. I’m a sysadmin, I want one boring day. One boring day when the manual is correct, when the servers stay up, where everything just works. That would be the perfect boring day. And Then I’d be able to work on my projects, because projects are exciting. Then you’d get to play with the newest software, the newest hardware. I want lots of things to become boring so I can work on the exciting stuff”

First, this is finally what this website is about. Here I get to detail my ongoing struggles with the world of technology for my own records. If somebody else happens to find this useful all the better.

I just reinstalled Debian Sarge on my workstation. I had some things in mind that kind of necessitated a full reinstall including repartitioning my drives. I did a net install and then immediately upgraded to Etch. Prior to upgrading all was working well but afterwards X Windows would no longer come up. The error was a “preinit failed for input device” on the mouse.

The solution, when I finally found it, was to modprobe and then insert into /etc/modules psmouse and mousedev. This fixed the problem completely and as a perk I even have a functional mouse wheel on my Logitech mouse.

Now, I often don’t install X Windows on some of my Debian boxen but I’ve got a plan for this one. I’m going to start by installating VMWare Workstation and an XP machine on that. Once I’m comfortable I may move to VMWare Server (the free version of what used to be VMWare GSX server). That’s a whole nother story though.