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One good thing about not being an expert is that when you get something to work it feels like a blessed event has occurred, rather than something routine just happening the way you expect.
I took the server in just before noon this morning. Slid it into my little cage (looking enviously at the beautiful Apple Xserve someone else had in the cabinet above mine.) Hooked it up and booted not really knowing what to expect. Theoretically the machine was all set up and should just work. Realistically I knew this might not be the case.
And of course it wasn't. The server booted, of course, and everything *seemed* okay, but I couldn't get out onto the net. And I figured if I couldn't get out, certainly no one else could get in. Ugh. What a horrible feeling. I didn't even really know where to begin.
So I left and came back here and started googling. Wrote some frantic messages on some discussion boards. Even fired off an email to an old college friend who is a professional geek asking if he knew of anyone I could hire for a day.
I didn't get too far with my research, but I did figure out a few things to look for. And I knew in order to get anyone else's help I would have to have some detailed info that I didn't have (not having any access to the server from here.)
So I headed back to the colo. Turns out to be ridiculously convenient from my place - 4 stops on the J M Z. Anyway I set up again. They have carts with some monitors and keyboards on them for everyone to use, and you just wheel one over in front of your cabinet and hook it up. I decided, what the hell, I'll just wipe the hard drive and install from scratch. I didn't really think this would work, but I didn't really have too much to go on.
After a short spell in a strange place called boot loader hell - and a second complete wipe and install - I finally got back to where I was before. Broke. So I started taking the careful notes I would need (like the outputs of ifconfig and route -n as well as the contents of /etc/hosts, /etc/sysconfig/network, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, and /etc/resolv.conf) and started packing up, more than a little depressed at my failure right out of the gate.
But by pure luck one of the guys who works there walked by and sort of asked off handed how I was doing. More out of politeness than from actually wanting to know how I was doing. But I answered anyway, saying I was having some trouble, but also that I was just learning, and I sort of expected to run into trouble. I really didn't think it could possibly be their fault. He made a few suggestions which made sense, the best one being to hook my laptop to the ethernet connection and see if I could get that to work.
Of course. Good idea since I am very comfortable networking on the powerbook. This would help isolate where the problem really was. And the exact same thing happened. Everything configured like it was okay, but then I couldn't get anywhere. Pings just timed out.
The guy had gone around the corner where the big switches were for a minute, and when he came back he had a real sheepish look on his face. "How much time did you waste on this?" he asked. Turns out he had plugged me into the wrong switch. "Try now" he said, and I did, and it worked. Just like it was supposed to.
Hey, this stuff is easy!