A day in hell

04 Nov 2006 Today was a winner in the TOP-10 of suckiest days in my life.

The goal was to compile a 2.6.16 kernel with all the needed drivers, including those for vmware. I've spent the ENTIRE day doing 20 or 30 compiles, without success. In the end, I just gave up.

On top of that, the changes I made in the webserver configuration of the Ekonomika server were acting up. Normally a redirect directive should apply to the virtualhost it is defined in. Not anymore it seems.
For some reason, the normal redirect from ekonomika.be to www.ekonomika.be was overridden and pointed to mailman.ekonomika.be.
I couldn't find anything that could explain this behavior, except that redirects are now globally effective (which is denied by the documentation).
So what is it ? A bug in apache ? Is my config wrong ? bah! It worked before, why should it suddenly fail ?

To make things worse, I was involved in solving a problem with drivers in Windows XP... over MSN... involving someone who knows nothing of computers...
I spent an hour trying to figure out what was happening on the other screen, to the point where I was about to lose it.

Windows blows.

I'm gonna make a T-shirt that reads: Take your lousy Windows problem and shove it up your ass.

Or something more fitting, in case small children are around.

To ease my mind, I'm trying to solve the problem with the kerneldrivers in vmware. I found this reference which states

It appears that VMware's default SCSI driver also has problems. In the VMware
setup, choose to use the BusLogic SCSI driver instead of the default. That
seemed to help the boot process get futher later on.
...
Create a VM in VMware for the Fedora Core 4 installation. I used the BusLogic
SCSI driver. To do this, when setting up the VM initially, choose "Custom"
instead of "Typical". Later on in the setup process, choose BusLogic instead
of the default SCSI driver.
...
If you have problems when booting, you may want to capture the system boot
messages. You can do this by redirecting them to a fake serial port, and having
VMware capture the fake serial port to a file. See http://www.coolverification.com/2005/12/debugging_fc4_k.html for details.