Why I hate computers

[crowinsnow]

I built a new dns+mail server for my old partner yesterday. Installing software is easy. What's hard is

1. spending most of a day poking at conf files and watching a reinstall, because he brought in a machine that freezes up when the desktop loads
2. figuring out that the servers won't work because he turned on a firewall
3. discovering that sendmail now installs with only local loopback and you have to modify the cf file to get it to talk to the rest of the world
4. remembering that sendmail doesn't include a pop server and installing that
5. pop server must have * for generic address connection, rather than the default blank

So much faster to say than to do. It's been a while since I've done the debug ritual and I've lost my taste for it.