So, redking pitched a fit sometime Saturday morning. When I awoke, it was silent as if it had been turned off. Powering it up revealed a black screen. No beeps, no BIOS messages, no backlight, no nothing.
I knew something was wrong.
Well, after some investigation, I suspected the motherboard had gone. A not-so-quick bike ride to MicroCenter later, and I had a new mobo. Now, I had done mobo swaps on machines before, and I knew there were quirks with driver stuff. redking has some interesting setups with multiple drives and such, so I had hoped it wouldn't be too bad.
The major issue was the network setup. With multiple NICs, you've got multiple MAC addys. I had paid close attention to plug in the network cables in the same place, but Linux decided (after a Fedora upgrade...I thought the boot partition had been fragged while trying to run after the new mobo, so I figured it was as good of a time as any for the pending DVD upgrade) to switch the MAC addresses of the eth assignments.
It was even harder to figure out, because things SEEMED to be working when I rejiggered the cable order. But nothing from the outside could get in. That's when I checked the MAC addresses and saw that the firewall needed a different addy to route the external traffic properly.
The big red herring was that I thought the routing table within redking was borked when I upgraded or installed new cards. I spent many an hour messing with route and ip route, trying to make sure it sent the traffic the right way, only to find out it was a simple cable/NIC/MAC misconfiguration.
Oh well, lesson learned and noted here for future reference.
Now, X still won't start, but at least web/mail/etc. are back online, and redking has the latest Fedora and shiny new mobo out of the ordeal. All things considered, not so bad.
So, I broke down and got a netbook. My HP laptop is nice, it runs Fedora rather flawlessly (touchpad and keyboard bugs aside), and it's got a big screen. But after my last trip to see my grandparents, it was a pain to lug around, and it had next to no battery life. So I figured the next generation was here. I got the new Asus EEE PC 1005 that Best Buy had.
I'll go into some details in the morning, as it's late now, but I finally got everything working well enough to use it. I'm typing my first blog entry here, I've got full keyboard, touchpad, networking, sound, and even some custom Asus widgets to do power management. There's some small bugs with display brightness, but I'm happy I can boot and update the system now. It really didn't take much. A BIOS upgrade was the big thing.
I've got Ubuntu running on it, so the next step is to see how Ubuntu does on this as a simple flash/python/ruby development system. Whee.
For now, sleep.