Arranging Deck Chairs

[BBQCH]

@MattBClassic

...you did not have the "Ultimate Driving Experience"

Point taken

(Come to think of it that's a bit of a dodgy strapline...I never want to get into my car and have it be the ultimate driving experience )

Tech questions will of course be posted in the appropriate place.

Thanks Guys.

[consused]

Originally Posted by MattBClassic

As to the Marketing (there I use the phrase again!), since you are not from the US, you may not be aware with the sheer volume of this stuff that those from the US are inundated with each and every moment. It breeds a distrust of any claim from products such that I never accept any of it until I independently research it myself.

Or try "Advertising" (a tool of marketing). Overall, I sympathize with your "inundation". Thanks to the internet, and it's "revenue from advertising" model, I think that a large portion (>50% maybe) of UK population are well aware that the volume is large and increasing. The US model seems to be pervading the world. We get advertising material through the letterbox (courtesy of the Royal Mail's err... junk mail service), on an ever increasing set of TV channels, local radio, internet, newspapers, magazines, shopping centres, buses, company vehicles, and sports venues (etc.). The increase has been dramatic here over the last 10 years. So far, we still have considerably less roadside hoardings (but less space for it).

It's often said that the US has more of a "sales culture" than the UK. I think that is true, by my own experience. One benefit from that culture can be a more professional approach from sales staff that should improve the more traditional shopping experience for the customer.

[dragonbite]

Originally Posted by smpoole7

... EXCEPT for the Broadcomm NICs in one of our Dell Poweredge servers at work. That one was a buggy bear; trying to do an OS 11.1 64-bit Net install, it would DHCP and successfully get an IP address, but would go no further. "No repositories found." A quick Web search showed that some drivers used for Broadcomm have issues. I switched that particular server to CentOS (which apparently uses different drivers) and it worked fine.

Wouldn't it have been just as easy to get another NIC?

We had a server in the computer club which would not take CentOS or even Ubuntu due to RAID drivers and such. OpenSUSE, on the other hand, ran and installed without so much of a shrug of its shoulders!

Came to find that Red Hat had dropped support for that particular raid card at one point, and then reinstated it in a later version (presumably after enough customers complained when they ran across similar issues as we did).

[daviddell]

yeah, really interesting!

[luvr1961]

Originally Posted by BBQCH

Imagine, then, my disappointment [...] realizing that when it's all done simply plugging in a network cable from a VDSL router doesn't allow me to connect to the Internet.

I have just installed openSUSE 11.2 on a computer with a wireless connection. It did connect to my router alright, and it got handed a valid IP address through DHCP, but it wouldn't go to the internet.

Turned out that it hadn't configured its route table correctly; this is the very first time that I had this happen to me, on any Linux distribution.

From my experiences with an earlier SuSE release, quite a few years ago, I remembered that SuSE used to have a deeply buried "Advanced" networking option, which at the time I had to tweak in order to make SuSE configure the DNS settings that it received from the router. Even then, I considered this issue a nuisance, for which there really wasn't any good reason.

The issue this time was somewhat similar; I edited the network connection, went to the "IP Address" tab, and noticed a list box from which I could select "Basic settings," "Additional addresses," and "Routes." Since the issue had something to do with routing, I selected the "Routes" option, which displayed two radio button options, both of which were selected:

• "Ignore automatically obtained routes," which clearly had to be deselected;
• "Use only for resources on this connection," which I initially did not understand, but which I had to deselect to ensure that the default route would pass through this network interface.

No big deal, really (one you understand it), but this (totally unnecessary) issue should not happen on a distribution that wants to be seen as "the easiest" Linux distribution available.

[Knurpht]

Originally Posted by luvr1961

• "Ignore automatically obtained routes," which clearly had to be deselected;
• "Use only for resources on this connection," which I initially did not understand, but which I had to deselect to ensure that the default route would pass through this network interface.

No big deal, really (one you understand it), but this (totally unnecessary) issue should not happen on a distribution that wants to be seen as "the easiest" Linux distribution available.

You hit one right here. I found out about this today, on two 'wandering wifi users'. Once connected somewhere, the networkmanager will not only not take the default route (via DHCP), it will use the route of the last added connection (AFAICS). After unchecking these 2 boxes in all saved settings, they could connect and connect everywhere in the building to any wifi-router.