SVN Dump

So, I've had a few hardware issues over the last few days, I had hoped to sit down and get on with some coding; of a project which is now four months without any love and needing a LOT of input... But, hardware has stepped in the way.

First of all, I had a failing hard drive in my development machine - I had to pull the drive and then start a fresh install of Windows for that machine (its my main Visual Studio machine so I am at pains to virtualize it itself), this may seem no big deal, but I currently only own the abortive step child that is Vista, so my Windows experience on this machine is always... interesting to say the least...

So, fresh install, no problem, set back up, Visual Studio up and running and I even had a peek at the 2012 Beta of Visual Studio - I agree with everyone else, the monochrome feel is very annoying.. But then... I couldn't get to my code server...

This was strange as the code server is approximately 3 inched to the left of the machine trying to get to it, they're connected via a 10 port gigabit hub... And it all always worked before... I checked the code server (Ubuntu Server with Apache & SVN) its fine, its got its external wireless connection to the internet and its static IP on the physical connection to the hub...

I check the Windows machine, its also got its wireless connection and a supposed static IP address on the local connection across the hub... Yet neither machine can see one another... This was holding up code time at 10pm on a night when I was not only dirt tired, but that I had to get up to do some complex coding at work the next day... So it pretty much frustrated the crap out of me.

The next night I never got to take a look at the problem in depth, just to play about with the Linux side and try some ifconfig alterations, all to no avail.

I have tonight however, four days later, in the midst of the Easter weekend, managed to take a good look, and I've figured out, after an annoying amount of reboots, the problem... The problem is fucking windows... Get this... To set the static IP address AND use the Wireless I have to do the following:

1. Disable the wireless connection.

2. Set the wired connection to DHCP.

3. Reboot.

4. Set the static IP into the network interface on the wired card.

5. Reboot.

6. Check (by pinging) the server that we are on the network.

7. Check (by pinging) the Windows machine its on the server.

8. Enable the Windows Wireless connection.

9. Reboot.

Now, I am able to use both the wireless and the live connection to the server... VERY annoying, since the same thing on Linux can be achieved from the command line in two commands without needing to reboot like a moron...

Second on my list of woes, is that the server itself went down, well, not down on purpose but I decided to swap boxes about.  My standard server machine layout has always been a 32bit cut of Ubuntu server, this is what one assumed was on the server... So, I could hot swap the drive, right?... Right?...

Nope, the server had an install of 64bit Kubuntu... I do not know why... Even being 64bit the machine had only 2GB of RAM in it, so it didn't need to be 64bit... And I'm amazed I set up the major code server for this pretty important system as a 64bit cut, when I have no back up 64bit machine...

So, what was I left doing?... Basically, I've put the 32bit server back together, and installed a lovely new cut of Ubuntu on there (I've gone with a Gnome desktop environment, so I can do some build machine testing later with some GUI tools).  I've then set up apache, SVN and some basic tools to get things working and had to manually add my export of the old repository back in there...

No big deal over the now working gigabit local network (don't ever try to rebuild a 2GB repository over wireless - lol).

But still I feel like I've wasted so much of this code time for Easter.