New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

[oshunluvr]

I recent experience brought me to flash back on what it was like to be a "noob" so I'd thought I'd discuss it here.

I have a home network that includes a LAMP ( Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php )server running Ubuntu 10.04. It is primarily used for file and printer sharing and media delivery but one of my sons had in the past set up a web page in Apache as an experiment to access our shared files.

A recent addition to my hardware list is a Roku box (internet media player for a television). I have been playing with it for a week or so as a step toward freedom from cable/satellite services and the monthly expense.

One of the "deal breakers" of this project is I have to be able to play stored media from our home server, which most of these type of devices don't. The Roku will - with an added "Private Channel" called RoksBox. Long story short - I couldn't get access to my server like I should have been able to. Turns out somewhere in among updates and my attempts to configure too many things in Apache (that I have NO experience with, thus the noob feeling) left SSL working but http (port 80) not working and Apache was locking up the server on reboot - a big problem.

After a week of digging and web searching, I did the unthinkable: I purged Apache, Mysql and Php from my server, deleted any remaining settings and directories from the hard drive and then (with help from a beginners tutorial) I re-installed AMP.

Needless to say I am happily viewing my media files on my flat screen 50" plasma with the Roku. The total time to purge and re-install took less than a half-hour whereas the research and tinkering took dozens of hours and was not fruitful at all.

And now the point of this post: I am (as I suspect others are) often disappointed when my attempts to help resolve a problem another forum member are made useless because the person with the problem decided to wipe clean and start over. I wish to state I am of renewed understanding of this outcome and promise to take it less personally when this is the final solution to a problem. I still wish to resolve problems through research and trial and error so that we may all learn and understand more about our chosen OS, but I happily accept other outcomes as well.

Thanks for your time.

See you in the forum!

[toad]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

Great post!

And now enjoy your films

[Snowhog]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

And now the point of this post: I am (as I suspect others are) often disappointed when my attempts to help resolve a problem another forum member are made useless because the person with the problem decided to wipe clean and start over.

Sometimes doing just that is the quickest way to resolve the issue(s).

When I joined the Military (Army National Guard) back in 1981, I was trained to be a radio operator. One of the skills I was taught was how to troubleshoot radio problems. The fundimental rule was to always check the simple things first, rule them out, and progressively move on to more (and more) complicated possibilities.

When someone has a problem (or worse, multiple problems) with their Linux OS, and they don't keep good notes on what they are trying, or even worse, attempt multiple 'solutions' at the same time, and the result is either 'no change' or, again, made worse, it becomes extremely difficult to troubleshoot.

I keep notes on system changes I make; what was installed/upgraded/removed, and on what date. When, on the rare occassions I have had some difficulty, I start by examining my notes, and then documenting the problem - what is happening; what triggers it; any error messages; etc. - and then start my searching here in KFN and with Google for possible answers. Before I attempt anything that I think might offer a remedy, I make notes of what I am about to do, as well as making backups of any configuration files that I am modifying, and noting the results. In this way, I am nearly certain that I can at least return to the condition I was at before I began to 'solve' it, and in this way, I don't make the situation worse than it was.

Taking this approach is usually a longer ordeal, but it does work. I have, IIRC, only had to resort to reinstalling Kubuntu twice, and that was simply from a decission to upgrade to what turned out to be a buggy KDE (based on my equipment). Other than that, I have never had a problem with Kubuntu/KDE that I (or with the help of others) was not able to resolve.

[oshunluvr]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

At least this wasn't a total system re-install. That would have taken a lot longer to re-setup.

In this case I was partially a victim of time - too long between accessing the systems in question making it too hard to remember what I had attempted/done to it, and partially a plethora of websites offering totally different approaches to solve my issues. Once I had attempted six or seven things I became less and less sure I could solve it at all.

At the very least, I am functioning at the level I need which for now is good enough! Too much to learn and not enough hours to do it in...

[GreyGeek]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

....
I did the unthinkable: I purged Apache, Mysql and Php from my server, deleted any remaining settings and directories from the hard drive and then (with help from a beginners tutorial) I re-installed AMP.
.....

AMP and not LAMP? What OS are you running AMP on?

[oshunluvr]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

I think the "L" in LAMP refers to Linux so I removed Apache, Mysql and Php but not the base OS.

Ubuntu Server 10.04.1

[GreyGeek]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

True, that's what the "L" stands for, but the way I read it (or it appeared to me) you didn't "install" the L.

I should have never doubted...

[kiraitachi]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

haha It's a funny experience ^^, I remember having the same feeling when following I was following guides and I was a newbie at hacking and social engineering, later on I got better and I was the one who made the guides and I got so angry when people did not understand some point that was so CLEAR to me, I always remeber my times being a ''Padawan'' at hacking and security breaching, that's why now I always ask my little brother that is a newbie to read my guides to see if it's fully ''NOOB FRIENDLY'' hahaha.

Cheers Kira.

P.D.

By the way enjoy your movie!!!

[wizard10000]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

Allow me to share a lesson from Corporate IT 101:

The solution which a) solves the problem and b) uses the fewest support resources is the correct solution.

I almost got fired by a service manager many years ago for steadfastly refusing to call in Tier 3 support because I figured I should have been able to fix the machine by myself - tied the customer's hardware up for quite some time because my ego wouldn't allow me to call support or just blow the thing away and start over.

I can teach anybody to be a geek - but I gauge geek professionalism by what the tech does when he *doesn't* know the answer, not by how much knowledge he has.

We'd all like to know the answer - and blowing away a machine solves nothing, but sometimes you've gotta do it. In my current gig I'm the only one who can authorize reimaging a machine, as some techs choose that path just because they're too lazy to fix the damn thing.

For planning purposes here we use four hours as the time required to archive a user's data, grab a new machine from inventory, reimage it, reinstall his applications and migrate his stuff back to the new PC. In this environment if the repair is gonna take more than four hours techs should be reimaging the machine - and if it's gonna take less, they should fix it.

[oshunluvr]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

Thank you everyone for the kind comments. Now I'm trying to figure a way to extract movie data and posters (the jpg kind) from TMDB.com, format the data into an xml file, and add them to my movie collection folder. It's around 400 videos and movies so I REEAAAALLY don't want to do it manually!

[ardvark71]

Re: New guy? Not hardly and yet, here I am! or "Why I did a Re-Install yesterday..."

We'd all like to know the answer - and blowing away a machine solves nothing, but sometimes you've gotta do it. In my current gig I'm the only one who can authorize reimaging a machine, as some techs choose that path just because they're too lazy to fix the damn thing.

Hi all...

It's amazing what can be learned if reinstalling is not the first option.

Regards...