malvasia bianca

I upgraded packages on the new computer today. At first, everything went quite well – I was impressed at how quickly it downloaded the 300-odd packages it needed. (Apparently the networking works well!) And then it started installing packages; unfortunately, when it was most of the way done installing, the computer became unresponsive. (Largely: it would, for example, give me a login prompt, but go no further.) Sigh.

So I did a hard reset, and another ‘yum update’. Which got everything upgraded, but there were two copies of most of the packages lying around. I don’t know of any easy way to clean this up, and it was harder than normal to find the duplicates because, for some packages, there were supposed to be two copies (32- and 64-bit) installed! So I spent 30 minutes cleaning that up by hand; I think it’s in a reasonable state now, though chances are I screwed up in one or two places.

Then I decided to get ntp working. I have no idea why Fedora doesn’t turn that on by default; I tend to think that getting the time right is important. After some amount of futzing, I got it started on the new computer, and then decided to add the new computer as an ntp server for the laptop. (For now, I’m also having the laptop slave off of other servers as well; I may get rid of that.) This took a while – the laptop’s ntp.conf file was rather out of date (Fedora used to use inappropriately restrictive defaults), and I also had to punch a hole in the new computer’s firewall. But that seems to be all working now; the new computer’s time is still a little off, but the difference is down to about 30 milliseconds by now. So it should be well-syncronized soon.