The Legendary Fred. Holy man or Hallucinating Ham?

So we were back at St. Patrick's Academy this weekend working on one of the Red Hat servers. The problem as always is the local ISP provider can't make up their mind if they want to offer fixed IP or DHCP to their business customers.

So after going all school year with a fixed IP that I helped them set up last fall, they get bounced to a DHCP and all the dumb terminals go down. So big whoopidy-doo, we can fix it. Should only take 30 minutes or so.

So I go in and navigate the terminal command line in Red Hat Nash for the firewall setup and when I find it I switch it to DHCP and set the DNS servers to what was in the letter sent to the school. Nothing... I get a big fat nothing!!!
So back to the drawing board. I hooked up my laptop to the router and check my IPCONFIG (since I was already booted up in Windows) and grabbed the IP address I got and plugged those numbers into the schools firewall. I know, what a noob right. You can't actually hook up to a router that needs a fixed IP and have it give you your IP, that is against the very nature of networking and of course it failed also. So after telling a few jokes and some internal cursing I go back and set up the DHCP like I started with.

So nothings been happening for a few minutes and Old Man Fred decides to put his hands on a terminal and start preaching Hell Fire and Brimstone and asking it if it had the faith to be healed and to put a $20 in the plate. Now I know that Fred is crazy and all, but what happened next almost made me blow my cork.

The server behind me made a little beeping noise and all the terminals popped on just like that.

AWWWWW now come on, that had nothing to do with Fred!!!!

So I was a little miffed and the legend of Fred continues.

I guess when all attempts at sanity fail, you can still try the insane attempts.

Update for Broadcom Wireless

Image by Neokrisys via Flickr

This is a follow up article for my original post Bad Karma

After a recent mishap on my PC I decided to update to the 64 bit version of Ubuntu even though I had planned on waiting for 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS (long term service).

Now after running on the 64 bit version for a few weeks my wireless card had started acting funny. That's funny as in strange, not funny as in ha ha. Every time I powered on my computer and the wireless card was on I would not get any available Access Points, but when I turned the power off to the card I would get a list of A.P.'s but no way to connect to them. My temporary solution was to boot up the PC with the card turned off and then power it on after logging into Ubuntu. What a pain!!!

Next solution. In the windows world if something isn't working you just uninstall it and re-install it so that's what I tried. OH NO!!! When I tried to re-install the drivers I ran into problems that I didn't have the first time.

Problem 1. Ubuntu couldn't fetch the CD-ROM
Solution 1. insert the CD-ROM (DVD), go to the terminal and use sudo apt-cdrom add

Problem 2. everything that I had loaded from my previous article was already loaded and when I tried to enable the driver it failed
Solution 2. after making the Disc installable you want to use synaptic to search for and install bcmwl-kernel-source and then reboot.

Now i'm back in business and looking forward to many more happy days on Ubuntu.