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Orb Grafitti is sometimes a conversation, sometimes a soapbox. I use Linux most often, and I write about that and related software frequently. I also have a day job working as a dogsbody for a small manufacturing firm here in the SF Bay Area. Tom Syroid and I have co-authored a Linux Book. It was cancelled by $LARGE_PUBLISHER, so we're posting it online, here and here. Have a looksee! I'm glad you've come to visit, and always happy to hear from you.
EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.
Good morning. Lots of fiddling computer work going on around here. What with all the torch passing, I can't begin to keep up some days. Here's the latest lineup, for your reading portal pleasure...
Then of course, there's my start page, which I use because the links are tightly enough packed that I don't have to scroll down, and I'm a lazy cuss (as I am sure you've been able to tell <g>). Much of the rest of my day yesterday, after getting my desktop in order, was tied down with making OpenSSH behave the way I want it to. It was time to do a key rotation (because when logging into a remote machine I much prefer key authentication to password authentication, although both is good when working with an insecure box, like Gryphon, the Acer Travelmate).
So now I've just about got everything the way I think I want it - of course it'll involve changing my working styles a bit here and there, and I'll make adjustments as I go... Speaking of going, it's after 7. Tonight's topic: a whine about why there are so many different ways of getting the same damn thing done! For now, gotta run. See y'all later.
17:47 - Evenin'. I still have some 'sploring to do - But a little at a time, I'm making these processes more efficient. Mmmmm. OK. Patio Farm time...
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First off, as you can tell from the above picture grouping, I continue to be amazed at the way this Aloe plant is thriving in such... constrained quarters. The flowering process continues, with each pod slowing shading from green to translucent to yellow, then opening at the end, and sticking the sexy bits out. Not a stunning display, but interesting. In the center snapshot is the record of today's balcony temperature. Running around 36° C, it was up to 38 over in Newark. Then in the number 4 slot, we have a panorama shot of the whole balcony. Overall, I am pleased with this year's progress.
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Then we have the serried ranks of Tomatoes, standing ready to do battle with summer and the vagaries of my watering schedules. No observable fruit set yet, but it's possible there're some pinhead size things hanging about (think Zippy)
Now I am going to do some research and work to do for my lovely Marcia. So take care and I'll see y'all later.
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Good morning. Aside from being only slightly stupid yesterday evening, all is well in Hovel Bilbrey... Did you see last night's snaps of the thermometer, and the Patio farm? I thought you had, but just to be sure, don't you know. Now, back to today. First, a bit of mail - I'd been continuously forgetting to find out what happened with Dave Farquhar's site, since the editthispage arena started hosing on a regular basis. I had an IP number for Dave, but lost it somewhere along the way. Finally yesterday, I remembered to write to him:
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 08:20:13 -0700 To: [email protected] Subject: Hey, Dave... I've been meaning to put something up about your temporary IP site while you work things out for hosting, but I apparently lost the email where you told "us" - that is, I've put it in a folder someplace, and I can't find it again. ::sigh:: So how are you doing? later, .b
Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 20:38:37 -0500
From: Dave Farquhar <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Hey, Dave...
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400
Hi Brian,
Let's consider http://dfarq.homeip.net more or less permanent. It's worked
well for me so far and I really like the control of having my server sitting
in the corner of my office. If my traffic begins to outgrow my DSL line or
if proves unreliable I'll move it, but I don't see that being an
issue for six months at the very least.
My only regret in all of this is having not done it much sooner. The quartet
of Linux, Apache, Perl, and Greymatter is fabulous.
Thanks (and thanks for all your help in the past),
Dave
To: Dave Farquhar Subject: Re: Hey, Dave... In-Reply-To: <00d301c0d75f$9a907fc0$7302a8c0@localdomain> NP. Thanks for the update info, I'll post it tomorrow and update my Start page... I have yet to play with Greymatter, and may not, given my proclivity for living down in the nuts, bolts and messy bits - I presume it's a web-updatable content manager of some kind? Ask that nice Mr. Google, and by gum, yup. Mmmm. Maybe I will, one of these days. But really, I'd fidget so. Take care, .b
Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 22:15:44 -0500 Subject: Re: Hey, Dave... Yep, it's a content manager, but it doesn't isolate you from the HTML. What it mostly isolates you from is that hideous file management. I feed it an HTML template, and then I do some HTML markup within the posts themselves--whatever's appropriate. I throw in meta tags and hyperlinks to a search engine to do the "More Like This" thing I've been doing lately. For me, it's a nice compromise--let the computer keep track of the filenames and update the links, but when need be, I can still go in and code some HTML manually and it won't muck with my code. But it saves me from the routine markup like the p-tags, which saves me precious keystrokes. I guess I'm sold on it, huh? See ya, Dave
And that Greymatter link... well, there it is. Mmmm. No opinion at the moment - I'd have to delve into it, and I just don't have time. After taking a first stab at a new Netwidows logo for the wimmen, I started digging into Mailman last night. Mailman is mailing list manager (the good kind of MLM, Scotty) software. Following that, I plan on knocking out another few chapters for the Book that Tom and Brian Wrote (Speaking of which, thanks, Jackie, that makes you the fourth contributor to the "Encourage Us" cause - see the Preface for details). Following that, it's time to look into how to run an IRC server. We'll see about that one.
Oh, about being slightly stupid? Yeah, well, I finally got around to creating some custom menu items for working this site, in Bluefish, which I raised from the dead. Unfortunately, following the creation process, I forgot to select Options --> Save Config, so that when I quit Bluefish, they were gone. Not a great loss of time, easy to recreate, but annoying all the same.
Now I need to get on the road. You have a lovely day, and I'll see you back here later... Take care!
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System wars. Really, I meant to get lots done, and visit back here yesterday, but... I think I've got a hardware problem cropping up. I'm seeing hard lockups under multiple environments - It may well be heat related, as it's been quite hot here the last few days. The short and long of it is that this system is, I think, beta or perhaps even alpha hardware. Why would I say that? Well, I picked it up for a song, from an analyst friend who has the latest, greatest, newest stuff sent to him by Intel, AMD, various mobo companies, and who knows who else, to work with stuff and talk about it.
I'm thinking P&PC, mobo, processor and RAM here. I've got decent IDE drives, a solid (if dated) VooDoo 3 card, a new SoundBlaster 5.1, and I'm happy with the HP IDE burner. Sounds like it's time to call Bob. Well, after I get to work, anyway.
Now I've got to go water the patio farm. With the upper 90's farenheit weather continuing, if I don't water in the morning, half the balcony will be dead by the time I get home. Have a lovely day, and I'll see you on the flip side (I hope).
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Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... Yeah, the call to Bob went swimmingly yesterday, we nattered about processor speeds, motherboards, ram and cases for a little while, and I came up with a shopping list. Then I shelved that for a while to think about it, and worked on the final design for a new version of our captive 8-Port Cat5e compensated patch module.
I bailed out around 11:20, across the bay to Natus to meet Mary for lunch. We had Mexican in some little hole in the wall down on Laurel in San Carlos. I'd tell you the name of the place, but we came and went from the parking lot through the kitchen to get to the counter. Excellent food - I'll have to remember to ask Mary what the name of the place is, so that I can go back sometime. It's definitely lunch counter material, rather than dinner out, though.
Back at work, I found that the Illustrator art that I'd sent off to Peninsula Blueprint just a couple of hours before was ready for pickup. Very nice service, we needed to get this to our silkscreener, who had sheetmetal waiting for this art, and we have a customer waiting for the products that get built into the sheetmetal. So off I go, fully packed up and not to return for the day.
First to the print shop, then to the screener, then to Central Computer in Santa Clara. The tipping point for me really had come when I thought about the fact that of the three distros that I'd had in the system in the last week, all three used different kernel versions, and the current one, Debian (oops, forgot to tell you about that one, it was my tester install to see if it was the box or the new kernel acting up)... anyway, Debian I was running with 2.2.19 kernel. Yet the machine was still locked on me when I got up in the morning yesterday. ::sigh::
Purchases: Intel D815EEA2L mobo, Intel PIII-933, 512 Meg of Century (Japan fab) Micron CAS2 PC133, and an Antec KS282 case. Started at 3:10 in the afternoon yesterday, backing up my home data to both drives and across the network to Gryphon. I finally got to see the problem in action - I got three ... no, four kernel panics during the backup process. I knew I'd made the right decision - new hardware - when I had to reboot 4 times to backup my data before working the transplant.
I'll post a continued report on the operation, accompanied by pictures, this afternoon. Then I want to put up a another new chapter from The Book tonight, sometime. Now to water the Patio Farm and hit the road. Have a lovely day!
17:12 - Late afternoon... I finally pulled the snaps off of the camera. Oh, hey, good news there. As a standard install feature for RH7.1 (or at least standard if doing the expert install) - I plug in the USB smart media reader, it recogizes the new device, loads up the device driver automagically. I still needed to define a mountpoint for it (once, in /etc/fstab, /dev/sda1 /home/bilbrey/flash vfat defaults,noauto,user,uid=500,gid=500 0 0) and then it's always there. I just type mount flash from my home directory and voila.
OK, ok, so back to what I was saying. I pulled the snaps from yesterday's system build, and here they are:
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Building Grinch up was a snap, really. Just like Hans und Frans, ve pumped heem up! All the boxes up on the table, into the new case, out with the drive sub-chassis, in with the mobo, processor and memory. BTW, putting on that CPU cooler is a major pain. You have to apply enough force with a screwdriver that a bad slip and the mobo is plain-old-history, methinks. So carefully it was done, then stage one was complete. Then I had to wait through the reboots while I backed my data up off the system (as a backup to a partition that remained untouched through the rebuild and reload. In picture 3, you can see the old Grinch, down on the floor, waiting for me to gut him. By snap 4, all that was left was drives.
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Once I got the drives in, I dressed out the cables. Well organized cables promote good airflow in a chassis, as well as looking nice and making it easy to service the box. Picture 2 is the aftermath on the dining table - not much problem as I just dumped everything into the Antec box while I burn this sucker in (been running flawlessly, though). Snap 3 is the system at first boot. I've got the side still open because there's a mobo jumper to set for full BIOS settings access. Buttoned up and running like a top since yesterday evening, with an extra pusher fan at the front of the box, and an extra puller fan at the back of the box. I had to use a fan power splitter to run both chassis fans plus the CPU cooler. You'd think they'd strew those all over the place.
Oh, and look, the first Tomato managed to sneak in there somehow... Mmmm, looks like it'll be a few weeks yet, ya think? Anyway, now I am going to make some salsa (store-bought ingredients, except for the Cilantro from the herb box), then get started on converting Chapter 27, on Samba. More later, if things go well. Take care for now.
22:49 - OK, Chapter 27, Running Samba is now up and ready for your consumption, yet another big puzzle piece from Tom and Brian's Linux Book. Bear in mind - you can learn a lot from this material, but there's been a major new revision of Samba since we wrote this chapter, and you'd do well to supplement what we wrote with the actual program documentation of the version you're running.
Now I'll bid you adieu until tomorrow. Have a good night. TTFN.
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Good morning. Updating, briefly, from work after yet another power-run south, then back in the teeth of traffic to get some freshly silk-screened sheetmetal back here for final assembly and shipment today. ::sigh:: I went by the place yesterday, Clay said he was told I wouldn't be there until this morning, so the parts weren't ready yet. Aaaergh.
Just as a reminder, I managed to post Chapter 27, Running Samba last night late-ish, from The Book. Also yesterday, I posted some pictures of the new and improved Grinch in surgery, just in case you wanted to see. Now I have work to do, so I'll leave you to your day. Take care and see you later!
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Well, good morning. Give me a minute here, I think I really need that cup of coffee...
Rewind and start over: Good morning. I've been a busy boy this week - last night was the first that I've been in bed much before midnight, and that's challenging when the alarm goes off at 5:30 every morning - rain, shine or nuclear weapons. But it's been a productive week. I squidged up a new logo for the Netwidows that they seem to like, and put in a private mailing list for their convenience.
In doing so, I learned a little bit about how to use Mailman. The process is especially non-intuitive if working with virtual domains, as I am here. I'll do my best to illuminate the dark corner of that one in just a moment, but I've taken advantage of what I learned to set up a mailing list for this joint. If you're interested in hanging out on a mailing list with me and other readers from this site, please feel free to follow one of two paths. The list is called Talkabout, and you can go to the Talkabout Listinfo page and subscribe from there, or you can click this mail link, and send it. In either case you are required to confirm your subscription by return email. Welcome!
OK, Mailman. Configuring a list for a main domain is easy. List creation went like this:
[mailman@mail mailman]$ bin/newlist talkabout
Enter the email of the person running the list: [email protected]
Initial talkabout password:
Entry for aliases file:
## talkabout mailing list
## created: 11-May-2001 mailman
talkabout: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post talkabout"
talkabout-admin: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner talkabout"
talkabout-request: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd talkabout"
talkabout-owner: talkabout-admin
Hit enter to continue with talkabout owner notification...
[mailman@mail mailman]
Then all I had to do was paste the 6 lines starting with "## talkabout mailing list" into /etc/aliases, and type newaliases ; postfix reload. Then the system was ready to start accepting requests and list traffic (well, except for the list configuration routines I went through to customize list behaviour, like turning off archiving, making posts be only from list members, etc.)
However, making Mailman work with one of the virtual domains running off of this site was less trivial. I'll use a fake sample list for Marcia's site, DutchGirl.net, called Gardening, to demonstrate what I mean. The early part of the process I went through was essentially the same as above:
[mailman@mail mailman]$ bin/newlist Gardening
Enter the email of the person running the list: [email protected]
Initial gardening password:
Entry for aliases file:
## gardening mailing list
## created: 12-May-2001 mailman
gardening: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post gardening"
gardening-admin: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner gardening"
gardening-request: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd gardening"
gardening-owner: gardening-admin
Hit enter to continue with gardening owner notification...
[mailman@mail mailman]$
Now I paste those comments and aliases into /etc/aliases, update the database, reload postfix and ... nuthin'. ::sigh::. When going through this process the first time, I spent several hours over a couple of days trying to figure out how to support virtual domains with Mailman. After all, from the list of features on the Mailman site, it explicitly says "Support for virtual domains". I've had a heck of a time finding anything to document that feature.
Oh, major, Major hint here: It's tricky using a search engine to look for help on a mailing list manager. Just to illustrate my pathetic example, "Mailman tutorial" on Google returns 500 hits, mostly archived mailman lists, about tutorials on different topics, although there are useful things, even on the first page. Patience is counselled here.
I figured out finally that I needed to be paying mind to the /etc/postfix/virtual file, wherein I set up the virtual email domains. Yup, that was it - it leads to entries in virtual that look like this:
dutchgirl.net anything
# other addresses defined in the dutchgirl.net domain removed #
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
Once those were in, I executed postmap hash:virtual ; postfix reload to bring the changes online. Voilá! Apparently there is a similar routine to running Mailman with virtual domains under Sendmail, although the details will differ, of course.
Now to pop open the mailbag. First, last night Holden Aust and I went back and forth a bit about The Book, and various other things, but I want to share the last exchange, from this morning, with you:
Re: http://www.overclockers.com/tips453/
From: "Holden Aust"
Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 06:33:06 +0100
Hi Brian,
Man, do you respond to your email quickly!
I did see the article on the Overclockers site and all I can say is that my
experience is diametrically opposed to his. Of the couple hundred PCs I
oversee, the ones I hate the most are the handfull of IBMs and Gateways
that have Intel 815e motherboards in them, which seem to hate 3COM
and SMC NICs, and are always a battle to get configured. The ones I have
the least trouble with are the Athlon and Duron PCs, which just work,
whether with Linux or Windows. Doing Yet Another Windows ReInstall on
an AMD box is a piece of cake, especially with the SMC 9432 NICs, doing
a YAWI on an 815e is something I grit my teeth for.
We have 13 severs and 7 of them are Athlon or Duron - based clones I've
built myself. They run Linux and NT and have been as reliable as the IBM
Netfinity which cost almost three times as much.
I'm not accusing the author of that article of spreading misinformation, but
since my experience has been totally different than his, when I read an
article like that, it makes me wonder if this isn't some sort of Intel-FUD, like
the FUD that Microsoft is always trying to use against Linux.
By the way, I meant to tell you that I completely agreed with you, recently,
when you said that when one of your readers wanted to know if he could
get immediate consulting access to you, you wondered if that shouldn't
properly be billed as consulting time. That certainly would have been my
impression and my reaction, too. I have a friend who is a programmer who
charges everybody, except his mother. He says his aunt is happy to pay
him $50 an hour, because he is better and cheaper than what she would
have to resort to, if he didn't do consulting work for her. I don't go that far,
but sometimes when a friend asks if I can help his friend's friend, I do draw
a line. Another friend simply tells people that he wishes he could help them,
but that he simply doesn't have time, which is probably what I should say
more frequently.
I think part of the problem is that many people think, "Oh, well, he's so smart
with computers, he can fix my little problem in a few minutes". They, of course,
have no idea that it may take hours to track down their "little problem" and that
the fix might be YAWI. I once spent a day and a half trying to get a friend's
son's PC working right. I was becoming increasily convinced that he had a
defective motherboard, but since it was a PC that was under warranty and
since we couldn't get ahold of technical support on a Sunday, they didn't want
to spend any money buying replacement parts. At first, I had thought he might
have a bad DIMM and we had gone out and bought one (which wasn't a waste,
because he needed more RAM), but that didn't fix it. My friend's wife started
complaining that this was costing a lot of money and I was a bit annoyed
because I had wasted a lot of time reinstalling Windows, downloading updated
drivers, just to try to save them from having to spend money on a new
motherboard, all the time becoming more and more convinced that it was a
defective motherboard (which is what it turned out to be when they eventually
got the manufacturer to fix the PC). As diplomatically as I could, I pointed out
that, if my time were being billed at my consulting companie's normal time and
a half on a weekend, this would have cost them $2500 in consulting fees, so
although we had "wasted" $100 on some RAM, they had saved $2500 in free
consulting time.
I think she got the point and we're all still friends (and the next time I visit them,
I'm going to replace the manufacturer's cheapo "low-name" (the execrable PC
Chips - that's one brand of Athlon/Duron motherboard, I wouldn't buy!)"
motherboard with a Tyan or an Asus, because even though it "works" more or
less with Windows, I can't get the SiS530 video working properly with xfree86,
so I can't get his dual-boot Linux setup - I still couldn't get it working, even
after adding a Matrox PCI video card)!
Anyhow, it's a delight to visit a website where most of the commentary and info
is about Linux, instead of a recitation of what the latest maddening thing that an
MS-OS has done.
--- Holden
Heh. Yeah, well, your timing was good - I was away from the machines most of the evening. We went out to supper then played a fair game of Trivial Pursuit. May it be noted that we need a new set of cards; I've got most of the current ones memorized.OK. It won't be for a while yet, I suppose, but I'll talk to you about Athlons and Durons and such prior to my next system remodel. Especially, when Grendel dies (he's nearly 5 years old, running continuously as a server for about 2.5 - not too shabby for a Moo-Cow Boxen, huh?) to look for a Duron box to handle the smallish loads of our AWN server and gateway (role, heh and brand). OK. Now to go get coffee. Have a great day! .b
Which brought me back to my thinking on "free" consulting... Really, I do that all the time. Sharing knowledge, learning by fixing things, helping people out - I do like that. However, it all comes down to presentation. If I said to you (or you, or you), hey, help me save my company $500k, of course you'd ask me how much the job pays, especially if you don't know me from Adam. OTOH, if Bob or Tom or any one of a number of people call up and say, "Hey, I need help with..." I generally only ask "How high?". Those are two ends of a spectrum, and the answers are easy. On the gripping hand, there are people who don't want help sometimes, much as I'd like to. I've offered to drive up and help one or two individuals get Linux up and running, saving all the back and forth of email and phone - no joy, the occasional emailed question, the odd rant and that's all she wrote. Hmmm. There's no predicting how any interaction goes.
For that huge gray area in the middle, we're left with intangibles. Do I know you? How do you present your questions. Do you imply that I have an obligation to help? Mmmm. I can't quantify how I react to such things - it can certainly change based on a plethora of uncontrolled variables. The short and long of it is that I'll go the extra mile most of the time, but please, if you're asking me to work for your employer, then ask your employer if she's willing to pay cash on the barrel head or if I need to qualify y'all for Net 30 terms.
Now I am going to hop in the shower, then head over to the mall with Marcia. Back later, maybe with another book chapter. We'll see. You have a great day, OK?
17:22 - OK, yet another chapter is out and on the wire for your pleasure. Chapter 12, The Future of OpenLinux is the latest part of The Book to put in an appearance. Additionally, I've posted this event to the all-new Orb Talkabout list, you're welcome to join if you so desire.
Mmmm. Bad news, losing Doug Adams, like that and so young. Well, we didn't actually lose him, as such. We know where he is, but at least he made it off this ride before the Vogons showed up. He brought me as much pleasure as any of my other favorite authors - Several of my top Ten are dead, and I find that just a bit of a bummer, thank you very much. Now I want to take a walk, then I have some further explorations to do, so please enjoy your Saturday evening.
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Good morning and Happy Mother's Day. To all you mothers out there (and you know who you are), you have a great day, OK? Mine doesn't get flowers or a call today, because she's in the midst of travelling through wine and redwoods country, so I guess she's already having one of the better Mother's Days one might have.
Today Marcia and I are going to spend some of the afternoon over at my grandmother's house, and we have shopping and such to do, so I think I'll be cutting today short, especially since yesterday turned out to be so prolific.
The all-new Orb Talkabout mailing list I created is picking up a little steam, with a membership in the single digits. So far I've used it to announce a chapter release and some experimental work on the server, but please: this is not a Brian-to-the-world announce list (or I'd have called it Talkabout-announce, and only permitted posts from me). Nope, it's meant to be a discussion list, but I imagine that it'll take a while to build up, and that there will be an ebb and flow to these things. Thanks for joining, you early adopters. If you haven't yet, and you're interested, feel free to jump in the water. Click the link at the beginning of this paragraph, or use this mail link right here to start the subscription process. Nope, it doesn't cost a single penny, and I don't put advertising in it (nor does anyone else, since it's my mailing list server)
Now to get ready for the day. Hope yours is wonderful, too.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2001 Brian P. Bilbrey.