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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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September 02, 2002 - Updates at 0952 EDT
Good afternoon. Not much going on today. We're having another quiet rained-in sort of day, although we might totter off to Annapolis yet, I'm not sure. Happy Labor day, folks. I hope you're having a nice one, too. See you around.
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September 03, 2002 - Updates at 0753
and 1700
Good morning. It's back to work day, how lovely. I'll have pictures and a visit report from the weekend later today, for sure. However, I've got to get into work this morning, fairly early. We had a lovely, lazy time though. What gets to me is all that time spent not doing anything productive. I think being productive is genetic for me. That rather makes it hard to relax. Ah, well. I did anyway, and enjoyed myself.
Now to get a bite to eat, then hit the road. TTFN.
17:00 - I believe I promised a visit report, did I not? We hosted four Thompsons up here this last weekend. All but Kerry and Lenore were here. We had a very relaxing good time. Bob and I strove to stay away from the machines, which is far, far harder than it looks or sounds. The dogs played, Marcia and Barbara shopped, Bob and I talked a lot. Recommended.
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Duncan and Malcolm spent a not-insignificant fraction of their first 24 hours trying to either herd or protect various things. It was strange and wonderful. Sally slowly fit into a new mini-pack, and eventually Duncan got over his incessant desire to dominate her, through discipline from us and Sally herself. We played a lot of fetch the tennis ball, where I would throw the ball, they would go grab the ball, then drop it where it landed anyway, forcing me to fetch it. Mmmm. We hung out and talked a fair amount, and ate a scrumptious lobster supper at home.
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And there's some more dog pix for you. Me, I'm tired after all that relaxing. See you around.
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September 04, 2002 - Updates at 0651
Good morning. Happy Birthday, Pete! I'd call you right now and say so, but I doubt that you'll appreciate the phone ringing at 0330 local, heh.
Some of you persistent gentle readers may have already spotted the pictures that I put up yesterday afternoon, from the Thompson's visit up here. Marcia will probably have more from those sets in a while, as may Bob and Barbara.
In other news, there's a vulnerability in Apache. It's dated August 9 and missed me somehow, back when it was released. That's probably due to my being on a power-run back to Nebraska at that time. The limitations are that it's 2.X series flaw, and only affects Windows, OS/2, Netware and possibly Cygwin environments. There's a fix that can be done by modifying httpd.conf, or upgrade your Apache version to 2.0.40 or greater.
Mandrake has issued a release candidate for the 9.0 edition. I'll probably fetch it down soon and have a look. So what about the Red Hat beta, you ask? Well, I started mucking about with it last night. It has some really nice administrative GUI tools, the desktops are clean, easy to use, and not nearly as annoying as I suspected they would be. However, I ran into a show-stopper. Following initial installation of the beta, I was unable last night to install any other packages. RPM was hopelessly broken. Now that may be just an install failure, but I have too much to do, to muck with it now. So I popped in my SuSE disks - I'm doing some investigations into the FreeS/Wan VPN software. More on all of these topics as I can.
I've got this early start going, as you can tell. I'm out to Gaithersburg this morning. Then in early afternoon I'm haring down into the District to fix up some network printing issues, and a server virtual memory problem for a client down there. I hope that it goes smoothly enough that I beat the traffic back out. But I'd best start rolling. You have a great day!
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September 05, 2002 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. I'm sure that I'm not the root cause, but Mandrake's servers were truly horked last night. I went to fetch the beta, and couldn't get there from here. Period. Then I got to the site, finally, but there was some loop in the Mandrake site code, I could never get to the page that showed me download sites. So I went straight to my tried and true purveyor, ftp.sunet.se. That's the Swedish University Network, and man do they have some fat pipes. Here's a quote I found from a converted Cisco document about the proposed buildout. I have to presume this happened:
The new network that SUNet has planned will be built on a ring-based architecture with a backbone of 10 Gbps spread over four rings distributed throughout Sweden, then linking 2.5-Gbps access rings to each university.
I've pulled down all three discs and burnt them. Warning, Will Robinson - Discs one and two are both about 690M. That is, they're built for 700M CDR's. Be alert. I have some of those laying about. Greg didn't have any, poor fellow. Mandrake installed fine on Garcia late last night, like it alwasy does. but really, it hasn't changed much. On an initial look-and-feel survey, the Red Hat beta (broken RPM stuff and all) is a much more elegant system. I could sell my Mom on Red Hat with a desktop like that. I'll be doing a compare and contrast for LinuxMuse shortly. Really.
From the blog of DJ Adams, here's a little story of Windows and Linux (courtesy of Doc Searls). Summary: A peripheral that bluescreens WIndows, and runs like a gem on Linux equals happy Linux user.
I've got Annie Lennox singing There Must Be An Angel from the on-disk collection, this cut's probably off of a Eurythmics best of collection. And today, I've got another two client site day, which makes it harder and longer. But still not like yesterday, were everything was an hour from everything else. Today the sites are both to the northwest, in Montgomery county. I guess I'd best get to it.
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September 06, 2002 - Updates at 0650
Hullo. ... Wait, something's missing. Um, oh right. Coffee. I'll be right back. There, that's better.
I spent an inordinate amount of time last night working at being a hero at the client site today. They've been struggling to get a specific piece of remote frame buffer software running properly (think VNC or pcAnywhere, for example, although this package is just called rfb). The server's running on a Solaris 2.5 box, and standard rfb clients (like WinVNC, or TightVNC on Linux) connect fine, but the display output is color-shifted heavily into the reds. After trying a variety of things, late yesterday I thought why not run the same actual software on Linux as well, and connect server to client - theoretically they speak the same color palatte.
I pulled down the sources from HeXoNet, and quickly tried to build (no configure, just make depend ; make). No joy. So I packed up and came home. After a short while, I puzzled my way past the error messages to realize I was missing a library: Xclass. So I got that, built and installed it, then started the build process over on rfb. Woo hoo! It worked. Now to do that on another machine, so that I can have a client and a server to test with before today.
Um, oops. Xxlass won't build under GCC 3.x. Garcia and Goldfinger both have (had) 3.x compiled distro's installed (Mandrake beta and Gentoo 1.3B). So after supper, I installed Red Hat 7.3 on the backside of Garcia, built and installed Xclass, then built rfb. The server starts on either machine. The client won't connect. Argh. Bedtime.
That was my day yesterday. How was yours? I've got to get to work. See you later.
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September 07, 2002 - Updates at 0910
Good morning. From our friend Pat (and someone at work mentioned this yesterday, I think) there's notice of an anti-Gray Davis (incumbent California governor) website that's a rip on eBay. It's called eGray.org, and it's said that eBay's pretty upset about it, and perhaps the Davis reelection campaign is, too. So go check it out now, I've no idea how long the site will last online.
It's a pretty day outside, and I suppose that we'd better figure out what we're going to do: have fun or do more chores? One thing at a time, coffee first. I'll see you later.
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September 08, 2002 - Updates at 0854
Good morning. I spent an inordinate amount of time mucking about with trying to install Mandrake on VMware yesterday. Yes, yes, I know I've got real hardware that I can install to, but for getting installation screenshots, VMware rocks. However, I think that the latest distributions (first Red Hat, now Mandrake) have got configurations that exceed VMware's abilities to intermediate between the Guest OS and the actual hardware. Both blow up, in different ways.
Finally I resigned myself to just working with real hardware. So I reinstalled Red Hat Null on Garcia, and then setup VNC so that I can experiment with it in a window on Goldfinger, and write about it there, grabbing screenshots of the running OS/desktop at my leisure. At right you can see one of the results of this work. That's Null, running in the RH version of the Gnome2 desktop, Mozilla is browsing to the local CUPS server.
CUPS is the acronymfor Common Unix Printing System. I sit here today to tell you that CUPS rocks. Among other things, it provides a mock lpr/lpd/lpq suite so that standard Linux/Unix programs that know nothing else can work. It has both browser GUI and command line interfaces. But especially nice from my perspective is automatic network discovery of printers. The lj printer you see in the CUPS Printer screen is not local. This is running on Garcia, and the printer is located over on Goldfinger. I had previously configured Goldfinger's CUPS setup to broadcast printer availability (not setup by default, but it's OK behind the firewall). Then I merely opened up the system firewall that RH Null setup on installation, and poof, the printer appears in my new Linux installation. No searching required, no painful network printer configuration, just Poof!
There will be more on this topic in an article on CUPS for LinuxMuse, in a few days. I've got several articles in the hopper, and they're a little bit inter-related, so they'll finish up at about the same time, then I'll start funnelling them out to the site. About time, you say? Me, too. It's been too long, and I have an obligation to the members of the site. Hang in there, waiting is.
Today we're off to the Farmer's Market, then Costco. After that, I don't really know. It's cloudy out right now, and Yahoo Weather says light drizzle, mostly sunny. Huh? Hope your day is less confusing than mine is likely to be. TTFN.
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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 © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.
