Geek pain and pleasure

I never open Terminal to have a play; it’s always out of necessity. Saying that, some twisted little geek inside me masochistically enjoys having to open up the hood to poke around in UNIX from time to time.

It started with this: I was doing a file transfer earlier today (a movie file) to the network drive attached to the NSLU2 device. The wireless dropped out. File stalled. Then began the fun…

The drive thought the file was still in use. Resource busy. Permissions denied. Couldn’t delete the file. Couldn’t overwrite the file. This went around and around. Absolutely maddening.

Suffice it to say that my eyes and brain are on fire after trying for hours to get the permissions changed and the file deleted whilst avoiding messing around with scary sounding things like exportfs exports or unexports on the NFS directories. That goes a bit deeper into UNIX than my comfort level covers. I finally did it with a combination of commands that I could not possibly retrace here. But I’m not giving a tutorial‚Äî just typing a post of relief. (I’m the last person you want to learn UNIX from.)

I’m now transfering a fresh copy of the file over to the network drive. My ankles are crossed as my fingers are too busy typing this to assume the lucky position. I should probably not be tempting fate by doing this transfer via wireless again‚Äîgoodness knows, I’ve got ethernet cables to spare‚Äîbut I am. Some little masochistic geek inside is willing to take the risk, especially if it means I might get another crack at playing around in Terminal.

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