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Orb Designs Grafitti November 18 thru November 24, 2002 Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun Last Week  <--  *  -->   Next Week --> Link to the Current Week <-- Email Brian 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..

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
November 18, 2002 -    Updates at 0715 EDT

Good morning. Well, after dropping a couple of inches of rain on us over the weekend, this storm appears to have blown itself out of our area. It rained steadily all through, though, but never really hard, or we would have been inundated. Meantime, Sally's not quite smart enough (being both a dog and a blond) to do the math and figure out that her bandages come off in just three days. She's beginning to fret a bit more at the bandages. I'm sure she's starting to think that she's all better and ready to chase squirrels again. Think again, DogBrain. We'll see what the doc says on Thursday.

I got an email from someone who said, "This is the first time I have actually caught you on your Web Cam. I hate to tell you but it is not very exciting."

If it were exciting, you would have had to pay to see it. <grin>

Of course it's not exciting. If you were watching on Saturday, I had the camera on a high cabinet, and you could watch me dismantle the old desk and build the new one (pictures yesterday). But generally it's just me, sitting at the keyboard. I got the webcam to do experiments with motion detection and computer controlled home security. It still is part of the equipment setup that serves that purpose as well.

Now, I have a busy day ahead, with visits down into the District, then up in Wheaton. I'd best be on my way... Oh, yeah. I almost forgot to tell you. The United Linux piece is finally posted up at LinuxMuse. Thanks for your patience. Have a great day!

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
November 19, 2002 -    Updates at 0715

Howdy. Well, we went outside and stood about for a good half hour last night, looking up into the sky in hopes of catching a glimpse of a Leonid. Unfortunately, high clouds and haze combined with a nearly full moon meant that we could only see a couple dozen of the brightest stars in a medium patch of sky straight up. Anything closer to the horizon was just about socked in. Over the time we spent looking we saw just about none. Ah, sigh. And we deigned not to rise at 0500. Looking out at the fog and clouds now, I'm glad we didn't make the effort on this one, our sleep would have been gone for naught.

Yesterday was somewhat successful. Installing a new machine and discussing proposals for future work at one place, then installing client software on a bunch of workstations at another place, confirming the backups were running properly both places... all in all, not a bad day. I've got to go back to the first client tomorrow, to finish up with two more machines, once we get copies of Office XP to install on all of them. Now before you start in, I always pitch Linux where it's appropriate. What I don't like about Microsoft are their tactics and their licensing. The software itself is pretty decent, much of the time, other than the constant security holes, I mean. But then that just requires vigilance, just like running ANY software connected to the Net. Any. Short story long, I get my daily bowl of gruel for installing what the customers want installed. That's just... terrible, isn't it? Heh.

In the evening, I spent a not insignificant amount of time working with the Zaurus, mucking about with USB networking. There's one huge fly in that particular ointment. When I configure everything properly, plug all the cables into their designated receptacles, and drop the Zaurus into it's cradle, POOF! Goldfinger, my dual Athlon workstation, powers down. On it's own, no questions asked, it just shuts down. Bleah. Someday I need to configure this to try and work with another machine's USB and see if I have better success.

Meantime, there's work to be done, and I have to drive there to do it. I suppose I'd best be on my way. Have a lovely day.

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
November 20, 2002 -    Updates at 0723

Good morning. Today I've managed to wake up with a nascent headache. One of those starts at the top of my head and slowly spreads down to engulf my entire body sorts of headeaches, I fear. Ah, well. A couple of some form of mild pain killer should help with that. I'll check the pharmocopia closet on my way out the door this morning.

I had a reasonably successful day yesterday, installing a bunch of software updates for a Cobalt RaQ3 server. Today I'll be putting in a newer version of PHP, along with a number of other tasks. But yesterday's big excitement was having dinner with Moshe Bar! This raises the number of Daynoter's that we've met in person to Five! I consider most of these guys to be friends in one way or another, and it's a real pleasure to meet the people behind the screen.

We had supper at Legal Seafood, a restaurant down in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, just across the street from where the USS Constellation is berthed. We variously had Mahi-mahi, Crab Cakes and Linguini with Clams in White Sauce. Yummy! We talked our way through two and a half hours of comfortable sit down supper, and generally had a very nice time. Moshe is in town at the Super Computing 2002 conference.

Now, it's time to go find that aspirin, strap on my shoes and get ready to go. Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
November 21, 2002 -    Updates at 0716

Good morning. Finally, I got the Zaurus working with USB networking yesterday evening. I patched up Garcia (the PIII-933 Intel mobo box) with a source RPM that Greg found, unloaded a couple of older modules, and poof, it worked. The purpose here is to be able to load up the 256M CF card with tunes and readables. For "normal" networking, the CF wireless card works like a champ, but then, of course, the memory card isn't in the slot at that point, you see? It was suggested to me that the USB circuitry in the AMD chipset is a little less than stable, and that the problem may have been static electricity. There's a fair bit of that here in the house, although less since we picked up a humidifier. Maybe I ought to just start wearing a ground strap all of the time.

I've not much more than that to go with, this morning. I've picked up my copy of Dead Morn by Piers Anthony and Roberto Fuentes. I bought that years ago at a paperback dollar sale, and somehow never got around to actually cracking the cover. Then on the Zaurus, I'm reading Fallen Angels, the novel by Niven, available from the Baen Free Library. That's one of the few books of his that I don't already own... Well, I suppose I'd best be going. See you around.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
November 22, 2002 -    Updates at 0700

Good morning. I have two major items today. First, Sally is out of her bandages, stiff and unhappy each time we put the cone on her. The cone is to keep her tongue and teeth off her freshly unwrapped leg for the next few days. She doesn't have to be in it full time, but she absolutely does when we're out of the room, or the house. Adding insult to injury, I gave her a haircut and a bath last night. That's a stunningly large amount of work for such a small dog. When I was done, I took a look, then threw out the pile of hair that didn't have eyes or feet. Fortunately that was the correct choice. Her first bath in 7 weeks was well past due, but the delay was unavoidable, for obvious reasons.

The second item is one for any Squid proxy experts out there. Here's the setup. All clients point to a box running RedHat 7.3, Squid 2.4 and a variety of other services. Squid works great for most applications. However, when the clients hit a specific HTTPS site (which Squid doesn't proxy, it just CONNECTS through), the requested page asks for images from yet another HTTPS server, on an off port (8891, to be specific). Those images don't come back to the client, the application doesn't work. Now this isn't my box, the guy who's responsible for it is out of the country for another week or so. But we looked. He's got 8891 in the SAFE_PORTS definitions section of squid.conf. He didn't have it in the SSL_PORTS group. I added that. But also (and possibly complicating matters), he's got an IPTables NAT rule forwarding 8891 requests on eth0 (the internal NIC) to 8080 on eth0. I wonder if Squid and IPTables are working at odds. If you have any ideas for me, please pass them on.

For me, I'm off to Rockville for the day. We'll leave the inverse conehead home to mope. Poor baby. Y'all have a wonderful day!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
November 23, 2002 -    Updates at 0850

Good morning. It's going to be a busy day, which ever way it rolls. I was awake and almost out of bed at 0545, but didn't, then dozed off and on until sometime after 0715. I've had my first cup of caffeine, been through the email, and done very little else yet. Here's what's going on: I've got four distros to play with. What makes three of them distinctive is that I have never installed them before. The fourth is Slackware 8.1. While I've never used Slack for any length of time, there are too many people who I respect that like it for me to discard it out of hand. I've had RedHat 8.0 running on Garcia for a few weeks now, primarily as a test bed for various things that I'm doing with that distro at assorted client sites. Now it's time to move on. But will I have time today?

Also on tap, I have a Costco run to do, as early as possible, since the church people, the Thanksgiving shoppers and the tailgate partiers are all going to be out in force today. Marcia and I may head over to the Sugarloaf Crafts Festival in Gaithersburg later today, too (or tomorrow, that's slightly undecided as yet). Then there's the standards: Laundry, cleaning, naps, etc. So many choices, so little time. How about some email?

From: Jeff Buan
Subject: CanoScan with xsane
Date: 22 Nov 2002 01:24:21 -0500

Hello Brian,

I saw a entry on your journal about you fiddling around with the Canon USB scanner on Linux. I was wondering if you got that working now? Thanks, that seems to be the only obstacle in my full Linux conversion.

Regards,
Jeff Buan

Thanks for writing, Jeff. The drawback to your question is that it wasn't me... That was an email from another reader who was playing with a Canon scanner. Presumably you're talking about the first letter below this link: http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/2001/z20010326.html#weda It does look like support for canon scanners is spotty, and the same page strongly recmommends Epson scanners. Check this out... http://www.buzzard.org.uk/jonathan/scanners-usb.html Best of luck.

From: Darryl Hoar
Subject: Grub - Hosed it
Date: 21 Nov 2002 22:16:19 -0600

Well, I have a system with 2 SCSI 18GB Disks. It had win2k pro on scsi disk 1. I installed Gentoo as per instructions on the website. Everything went along fine. Got to the point of setting up grub.

grub> root(hd1,0)

I had setup /dev/sdb1 as boot

grub> setup (hd0,0)

Windows was setup on the first scsi. setup the grub config file, and followed the remaining steps.

On boot, it goes through POST, then just shows

LI

and hangs.

With Win2k already installed on scsi disk1, and

/dev/sdb1 /boot
/dev/sdb6 swap
/dev/sdb5 /root

What should my grub look like ? I searched google for gentoo dual boot with Win2k pro and got precisely bupkis. In grub, are all hard drive (IDE or SCSI) identified as hd ? Thanks and sorry to tie up you time.

-Darryl

- a pointer to a Fine Manual would be OK as well.

Yah. You hosed it. The good news is that you can fix it. I've done the same thing. The hints are in the Gentoo installation document at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml But here goes. Where my directions don't exactly fit your setup (because it's not in front of me, neh?), please feel free to adapt.So here's your layout, right? /dev/sda1 Win2K /dev/sdb1 /boot /dev/sdb6 swap /dev/sdb5 / OK. Reboot into the Gentoo install disk. Mount your filesystems (which you have already created, formatted and done the initial install on, correct?). Execute the chroot sequence as from the instructions, modified slightly since some steps have already been completed: # mkdir /mnt/gentoo # mount /dev/sdb5 /mnt/gentoo # mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/gentoo/boot # swapon /dev/sdb6 # cd /mnt/gentoo # mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc # chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash # env-update # source /etc/profile Now you're effectively at the same spot in the install as you were when you installed grub last time. Here we go. First, to answer your other question, yes, grub looks at all disks as hd0, hd1, etc. Now, you want grub to manage booting you either into windows or into Linux. So we want grub to be in the boot block of the first hard drive. # grub Starts grub up. grub> root (hd1,0) Now, that, above, was your problem. The grub root command is to specify your /boot partition. That's on the second HD. So it should read as above, not the way you typed it in your email. grub> setup (hd0) The setup command is correct, because you want it running from the boot sector in your first hard drive. grub> quit Dump out of grub, this part's done. Now here's a sample of a good /boot/grub/menu.lst file for your purposes. Please note that unlike the example on the Gentoo documentation, I have modified the disk references to match what you've told me about your disk setup... default 0 timeout 30 splashimage=(hd1,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz title=Darryl Gentoo Linux root (hd1,0) kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/sdb5 # Below needed only for people who dual-boot title=Darryl Windows 2K root (hd0,0) chainloader +1 That SHOULD do the trick. Save that as your menu.lst, exit out of the chrooted environment as you did previously, and reboot. Best of luck,

And with that, I'd best get into my day, however it's going to go. Have a good one yourself. Later!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY   
November 24, 2002 -    Updates at 1019

Good morning. Sally's gotten weekends figured out entirely. But she didn't get all the (in)action. Marcia and I did go to the Sugarloaf Crafts Festival (as I suspected yesterday), where indeed there were many, many things to be seen and purchased. We found a really cute sweatshirt for Marcia, a few other small items, and a marvelous candy shoppe. Then we came home, where Marcia and Sally took their afternoon siesta. Well, it was really just a continuation of the napping that Sally does all day and all night anyway, but for a while, it was on the couch, under the blanket, each pointed at opposite ends of the sofa. As you can see, Sally's good with the concept.

During that time, and into the evening, I tried out a few new-to-me, generally lesser known, Linux distributions. Using VMware as my demo install tool of choice, I first tried Arch Linux. I must admit, it was the black and blue website that drew me in (but not the text on the site - I hate reading white on a dark background). The install is very simple. Too simple in some senses. On my first pass through, I must have made an invalid selection along the way, all of the pertinent config files that allow the system to boot properly were blank. A reinstall, taking only defaults, got me through, I thought. Then came the Kernel panic. Oh, well. Life is too short to run experiments on things that only make sense to their creator. I mean, sure, I could probably muddle my way through, eventually. But I can't recommend it, now can I?

Next came Vector Linux, another so-called fast, light distro, based on Slackware. The installation is still pretty basic, text-based but functional, I was able to get an almost completely functional installation running on my first pass. It offers either xfce or IceWM as primary selections for Window Managers, although the latter is by far more "developed for" in this distribution. This might be worth some more experimentation.

Just for fun, I then picked up a copy of Knoppix (English language page linked). Knoppix is a boot from CD, run in RAM, Linux distribution. With suitable modifications, it could be used as secure firewall or router product, and a variety of other purposes. It looks like fun, and I will be mucking about more with it int the future.

Finally, I snagged a copy of the Slackware 8.1 bootable installation CD. This I wasn't going to waste time on in VMware. I am ready to give the former workstation called Garcia to Slackware for some serious work, so that I can get more familiar with the legendary Linux distribution that comes with such high marks from the serious Linuxen, administrators and gurus. One small problem. It won't boot on the hardware. Sigh. I don't have a floppy drive in that machine anymore. The disk itself was fine - It booted right up in VMware. So I pulled Slackware sets down from the net and built my own bootable installation disk. Poof. Nothing. I begin to suspect that the BIOS is a tad old in Garcia, but I can't update it without a floppy. Impasse. I'll return to this later.

I've got chores today, and quite a number of things on my list, so I'd best get busy. Take it easy, fly low under the radar.

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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.