On Thursday Paco helped me fix the last problem with my Mono installation. In the httpd.conf file to configure Apache with mod_mono, besides the usual Alias, MonoApplications I needed to have the following lines in the directoy tags:

Order allow,deny # Security issue with mod_mono
Allow from all # Provided by Paco Martinez

This fixed the problem I was having, which was security related. I was receiving a 403 forbidden message from Apache.

So all was right with the world until Friday after lunch SuSE started freaking out. I started getting error messages while reading OpenOffice files and finally was unable to proceed. I restarted Linux (In the open source and Linux communities we say restart instead of reboot. It makes us believe that we’re above the old Windows creed, “If windows is freaking out, just reboot” That will fix it! In the end it is same thing.) and then all hell broke loose. I got a strange message during the boot that there was an error reading or mounting the reiser file system, which seemed bad, really bad. Linux automatically rebooted and then more weirdness ensued. To cut a bad story short, after trying a few things with PJ Cabrera’s (my partner at SNAP) help, we concluded that the filesystem had been turned read-only and there was no way (among us mortals) to remove the setting.

After spending three weeks and probably 25 to 30 hours working on my Mono installation for the LJ article, I had to re-install SuSE. What a blow! Looking back I have no clear idea what happened, but my best guess is that I let the battery get too low on Thursday night.

I had attended the first workshop for the EnterprizePR 2005 business plan competitionand used the laptop. I wanted to generate some buzz about open source and Linux so I took notes on the laptop during the presentation, hoping someone would ask about . I got a warning at 10% battery remaining and proceeded to suspend to disk. Everything looked fine after plugging in Friday morning and working for a few hours. Later after another unsuspend from disk, Linux was operating very slow and then wham, disaster. I’m not sure if I could have done anything different; It would be all second guessing. Luckily I was able to get my most recent data off of the machine but Mono was lost.

Frankly I’m at a loss to share any grand insight I learned from the experience. I would have to say simply “When Linux works, it works great. When things go wrong, they go really wrong. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.” As with all computing, when your pushing the envelope you have to expect to crash sometimes. So always be prepared for the worst.