Work has some old SNAP server, long since decommissioned. We were sold a bill of goods on this particular (alleged) server, more correctly referred to as a storage appliance. It was never supported well by the mfgr and was a real nightmare for many reasons, the first being some bizarro linux rights implementation that did NOT play well with a Windows network. Plus the web GUI from hell.

Its really good point, aside from availability and RAID5, is its data security. It held onto the data so securely that I couldn’t remove 25% of it. It wouldn’t let me, regardless of login.

Taking the back way, I decided to beat up on the volume. No luck. Then I went after the RAID array. It blew its nose in my general direction. As a token, it let me take one drive out. Yes, folks, this is data retention at its finest.

Meanwhile, we had a naming party. The one we settled on caused much hilarity for the greater part of the evening. We took steps to make sure it would never be visible to the network. And if I were to type it here, I’d have start blogging elsewhere.

The fellow who sits next to me and knows 10 linux commands because he HAD TO, turns on the internal SSH server and POOF - there we were, inside the appliance. I had root shortly thereafter, largely due to their hilarious security implementation.

In spite of FTP being switched on via GUI, it wasn’t FTP-ing. This turned out to be because it wasn’t actually running. I located the config file and went to edit it…. no nano…. no ted…. (How about jed?) no jed… not even a DOS edit. [cue Jaws music] It was time to face…. VIM.

A lesser man would’ve wet his pants and run. A better man would’ve sucked it up and faced the enemy. I chose to locate nano.

Oops… no apt-get. Uh-oh.

Bloody hell, it’s RPM. Now I have to remember how I did it during my long two weeks with Red Hat 5.2…. no web browser, barely a connection. I looked nano up on a workstation and found that it wouldn’t be a problem; I could choose from any of 400 variations of nano, specific to distro. Never mind that I didn’t know which distro it was.

Uname provided gobs of information. It told me it was Linux.

And that’s were I left it yesterday. I expect success today, but I will spend more time trying to avoid vim than I would just doing it. And that’s me.