need. cable. now. | the joys of linux

July 12, 2005 &bull cycling, linux

We haven’t had television “service” for four years. Tonight is officially the first night where I really wish we did. Truth be told, I only want OLN so I can watch Armstrong rip up Courchevel. It’s possible I’m overlooking something, but you’d think in today’s world one would be able to find someone streaming the tour online. Heck, I’d definitely be willing to pay a few bucks for something like that. Why aren’t broadcasters/cable companies offering some type of programming online? Perhaps they are and I’m just in the dark. Or perhaps they are afraid that folks like me who don’t want all the crap on TV will abandon their cable contracts and go exclusively with programming on-demand.

On an unrelated note, I’ve spent the last couple nights configuring an internal DNS server (BIND 9.3) on my Slackware box. It’s pretty amazing at how utterly inept I am at Linux server administration. But, I guess that’s partly why I’m so drawn to it. My Windows DNS “server” had a hardware failure so I figured I’d simply transfer the role onto my Slackware server. On a Windows Server 2003 box I can get a secure DNS server up and running in under 5 minutes. However, as I’ve learned over the last couple of nights, the same task on a Linux box has taken me about 4 hours (and I’m not even sure how secure my “chroot jail” is!). So as to not scare off any future employers, I do have to say my 4 hour BIND sojourn was the first time I’d ever looked at BIND on Linux and I had to write my the zone files from scratch. Now that I have the process documented I could probably do it in a matter of minutes. My point: Linux, for me, is tough. But fun.

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