Today was one of those days at work. If you don’t like reading a long techy rant on why things don’t work and then do work, and you aren’t really sure why, I suggest you read something else. I’d recommend MLB.com.

The new wireless stuff we’re working on is based on NoCat. It’s a Linux based AP solution for community wireless solutions, which doesn’t really apply to our environment — but it has an ‘authenticate before you can use wireless’ method which is applicable. So, I’m working on bringing that online Siebel Center. We’re planning on mimicing a similar solution CITES has deployed, and that means the gateway box is running Linux off a CompactFlash card instead of a hard drive. Yesterday, I finally had the IDE/CF hardware and an overview of what I needed to do, so today I started working towards a nocat solution for CS.

I decided to start with the CF-to-IDE cards, and getting the nocat gateway online. (The other, larger part of the project is configuring it and the nocat auth server.) This morning’s issue became getting the CF card system online, review how CITES does it, and move on. I didn’t get that far.

The CF distro CITES is running is Pebble Linux. I couldn’t get the CF card I got from CITES to work, so I created my own Pebble distro on another card, and spent the rest of the morning, and afternoon, trying to get them to boot. It kept hanging at the “Ok, booting the kernel…” prompt. It’s hard to debug that. I tried lots of different systems, thinking it was the computer’s fault. I tried different CF cards, different CF/IDE cards, moving IDE cables around… I would mount the card under another running Linux system, check it out… Rebuilt the card, no luck. I realize at the end of the day why the community wireless groups go with the CF config over the hard drives, but I am not sold as this on a solution for us, and it’s certainly a poor, poor “try it and see” developmental/test-bed environment. I spent a ton of time working on this, and thought about throwing in the towel a few times — but I figured I could look at this today. Tomorrow, I’ll move on, but today I wanted to figure this out.

Around 6:30 tonight, it started working. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it didn’t work before, but I finally got the CF card I built (not the one I got from CITES,) to boot. Then, something happened (I think I shut the box down,) and it corrupted the CF card and I had to rebuild it. It turns out pebble linux doesn’t bundle in the 3com 3c509 card I was running in the system, so it wouldn’t see the network card.

This stuff’s hard. Nothing about networking “just works” anymore.