The Grand Old Sysadmin

[To the tune of "The Grand Old Duke of York"]

Oh, the grand old sysadmin,
He had an NT box,
He set it up with a firewall,
And a lot of process locks.

And when it was up, it was up.
And when it was down, it was down.
And when it was only half way up,
It was neither up nor down.

403

That silly song was written to relieve my bad mood (successfully, as it turned out!).

I'd been browsing Dave Central looking for funky Perl and CGI stuff, and came across a nice-looking CGI program called Perlboard - it sets up a message board - and thought "Hey, I could use this for my course website!" Downloaded it, configured it, uploaded everything to to the server, went in through my browser and got the dreaded 403, which basically means "You're a nobody. You have no right to access this file. Get out of here before I call the cops." Wah! I know this account has CGI capability, because the sysadmin told me so (I was following up Arya's question about whether it would do PHP and MySQL - it doesn't, unfortunately). I feel so inadequate, especially after sending yet another mail to said sysadmin asking her to explain the problem in newbie terms. I know UNIX, I know Perl a little, but CGI is a whole new world to me.

Moral - spend less time setting up fun software for your students and more time planning lessons. I must remember that I'm an English teacher first and a wannabe hacker second.

Oh my God

I just found out that while messing around with this Perlboard thing, I screwed up with my FTP program and did "rm -r" in the wrong directory. My whole site is gone! And it would happen to be the one site I don't have backed up locally.

mv self /dev/null