Home Graffiti About Sitemap Visual DevWork Email Brian GPG Key

GRAFFITI -- June 02 thru June 08, 2003 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.   About 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..

WebCam

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 02, 2003 -    Updates at 0734 EST

Good morning. Happy Monday to each and every one of you. I mean that as sincerely as I can in a bitter, cynical way. Gosh, I despise Mondays from the depths of my being. There's absolutely nothing that can be said good about a Monday except, "It's over!". So how was your weekend. If you missed mine around here, I blithered on about my latest conspiracy theory regarding SCO on Saturday, then looked at the webstats and Gordon Moore on Sunday.

But that's not all, oh no! On Saturday I built an easel to hold up the large mirror in our bedroom. It still needs finishing, so pictures of that some other day. I've also got an entryway coatrack to design and build. Yes, I meant entryway - it's too small to be called a foyer - it is more the unlikely intersection of a staircase and two short hallways. But there is room for a low-profile coatrack, and that's just what Marcia's been wanting. So that's coming up soon.

Late on Saturday evening, I noticed that the downstairs toilet tank hadn't stopped filling since... um, earlier in the evening. No flooding, fortunately. After a bit of exploratory surgery, I found that the odd little contained-bladder water shutoff had failed. So I shut off the water at the wall. Yesterday afternoon, I went off to Lowe's and picked up a float/valve replacement assembly and got that into place without a hitch. Then I cleaned the garage, gave myself a haircut and beard trim, and had a spot of lunch.

Then I headed upstairs to do a bit of online fragging in UT2003 with Greg. Therein lies another tale. I popped into my gaming partition, a Win2K install on the front end of HDA in Goldfinger. Hmmm, it bluescreened on boot. Not initial boot - Grub loaded fine, and the initial windows boot seemed OK, but it died somewhere in NTLOADER. Now I've got a problem. The issues I've been experiencing lately on this workstation, well, I've attributed them to video driver and bleeding edge Gentoo install. But if both OS's on the box are having problems, then all of a sudden the viewpoint changes.

My initial suspicion was that I had developed a bad memory stick. So I pulled the box, popped both 512M sticks and swapped them. As I did, I just happened to notice that one of the CPU heatsinks was much, much hotter than the other. Oh-ho! That's not good. I fired the box back up, and noticed two things. The first was that the boot into Windows completed without a hitch (after 5 failed attempts). Second, putting my fingers in front of first one CPU fan, then the other, I found that the hot heat sink had a cause - one fan wasn't moving much air. Sigh. Down with the box, again, and this time flat on it's back.

These CPU coolers happen to be aftermarket Antec units. You'll recall that I was getting odd noises from one of them a few weeks ago. That turned out to be the label sliding off center, and destabilizing the fan. I guess it did more than that. It must have damaged the bearing in some way. So I dug into the boxes buried in my closet, and pulled out one of the original coolers that shipped with the Athlon MP box set. I carefully scrapped off the old pad from the bottom of the heatsink, and equally carefully spread a thin layer of Artic Silver thermal compound on the processor. Then I installed the cooler, plugged in the fan, crossed my fingers and my eyes, and powered up the box. Everything came up right away like a champ. More air flowing over that processor now, and that's good. And the whole system seems much more steady than it has. I've got some more experiments to run over the next few days, but I might have to retract some of the computer hatred I've been blowing off over the last few days. Or at least I'll redirect it at the hardware, rather than the OS.

Two good news items, and one odd, all culled from Slashdot last night: First up, that screwy suit by SearchKing against Google for modifying their ranking. It's been dismissed, huzzah! Next up, another screw loose that needs tightening, Darl McBride, the usher at SCO's funeral, has now publicly admitted that a buyout would be a good way to make SCO shut up. Finally, the oddest thing there, an invitation to The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference Wooo-hoo!

Today, I've got a Dell box to install, a network to backup, some pruning to do on a couple of network servers, and a software/connectivity problem to try and help solve. All at one client site, but first I've got to drop off my expense report for May at the office. I suppose that I'd best be on the road. Take care.

Top  /  Email Brian

Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 03, 2003 -    Updates at 0701

Hullo. I'm out of time before even I start. A busy day yesterday and another one looming in the foreground. I'll try to catch up with y'all later in the day. Be seeing you...

Top  /  Email Brian

Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 04, 2003 -    Updates at 0716

And I didn't stop moving until 2100 last night. I was at work, or commuting, until 1845. I got in the door, fed the dog, cooked beef/broccoli stirfry for supper (it was my turn, after all), we ate and I came up here to get to work on the remote mailserver configuration project I've been working on for another customer. After that, I really wasn't minded to put up any more of a post - I would have been far too grumpy.

Oh, good morning. Keep an eye on Ximian, I'm reading good, interesting reviews of XD₂(at least of the beta, which I can't seem to find). I was impressed with what Ximian did to make Gnome palatable for me last time, with 1.2 - I can always hope that they do for Gnome 2.0 what Red Hat didn't quite accomplish with the Blue Curve theming - make Gnome something I want to work in. I can't quite put my finger on why KDE's design philosophy has seemed to just edge out Gnome in terms of my tastes in the last few years, but a healthy competition (combined with some collaboration to help build interoperability) is a good thing. You'll note taht with two open source projects such as these, there's no issues of conflict of interest or problems with regulation or SEC complications. They work together or they don't, no skin off of anyone's back either way (really, but it's hard to tell with all the flammage from time to time).

I see that Martha Stewart is likely to get a new fashion accessory in wrist-wear today, as it's possible that a grand jury indictment may be handed down for alleged insider trading, followed closely by an arrest. It couldn't happen to a nicer hot melt glue maven, really. But more to the point, it's that Martha Stewart annoys me. I think that insider trading laws are a bit silly, really. They ought only to apply to people who are in the investment business (banks, brokerages, etc.) along with employees of the company in question and their family members. I mean, why is it illegal to seek the best possible information about your investments and act accordingly? You mean, I might make some <shudder> money, or better yet, not lose any? And this is a problem because??? Yah, yah, the little guy will lose out. Look, the little guy loses out already. Who's surprised. But for a first edition copy of Martha Stewart Jailhouse Living, that I'll pay good money for, frame the cover and keep it near me, just to have a chuckle.

One more item from today's grab bag: the latest BOFH is up on The Reg, and it's a hoot: ...not just tedious or meandering. I'm meaning a talk so Dull you'd think Richard Stallman had taken over your body.. That line had coffee coming out of my nose... the wrong way. And it's useful info, too. All about how to junket in such a way as to increase junket budget for next year. Highly recommended stuff. Now I'll leave you be to enjoy your day, right after you hum a few bars of this new song by Rick Moen and Karsten Self (courtesy of the SVLUG mailing list):

Archived copy will be at
http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PiratesOfPenguinance


                   Modern SCO Executive
    (Apologies to Gilbert, Sullivan, and most of humanity)
      (Send brickbats to:  Rick Moen and Karsten Self)

[The scene:  Major-General Darl McBride has stepped up to the fo'castle
of HMS SCaldera, which has just fought its first skirmish against the
dread Pirates of Penguinance.  He prepares to hold a press conference^W^W^W^W
address the troops:]


McBride:

  I am the very model of a modern SCO executive.
  Our market share is minuscule; our losses are consecutive.
  But from our labs deep in U-T, you very soon will surely see
  The ultimate, the pinnacle, in high-technolo-barratry.
  "Live free or die" philosophies are very well, but still, you see:
  Our contracts and our trade secrets make Unix seem our property.
  Never mind what we really own (a question not rhetorical):
  We have thirty thousand contracts, though most are quite historical.

Lawyer Chorus:

  We have thirty thousand contracts, though most are quite historical.
  We have thirty thousand contracts, though most are quite historical.
  We have thirty thousand contracts, though most are quite historical.

McBride:

  While our profit's been elusive, our tort claims are unremitting,
  And Blake Stowell's PR quota is still dozens at each sitting.
  In short, in matters litigual, continual, accusative,
  I am the very model of a modern SCO executive.

Lawyer Chorus:

  In short, in matters litigual, continual, accusative,
  He is the very model of a modern SCO executive.

McBride:

  Our history's mythological (per Eric, it's not factual).
  I answer simple questions with evasions indeciph'rable.
  I'm quoted in the IT press, first one and then another way,
  And if that's not quite sufficient, then Sontag runs some blocking play.
  I'm not so good with copyrights, Novell's got those (they say to us),
  Our patent holding's very slim, our valuation's perilous.
  But please don't ever hit me with our POSIX system standard score.
  I'm always quite confused by that infernal nonsense System 4.

Lawyer Chorus:

  He's always quite confused by that infernal nonsense System 4.
  He's always quite confused by that infernal nonsense System 4.
  He's always quite confused by that infernal nonsense System 4.

McBride:

  That freaky hippie GPL, you'd think we'd never heard of it!
  And all that code we say they took?  The Stevens book's got every bit.
  In short, with markets minimal and losses quite consecutive,
  I am the very model of a modern SCO executive.

Lawyer Chorus:

  In short with markets minimal and losses quite consecutive,
  He is the very model of a modern SCO executive!

McBride:

  Our name is "SCO" (although we really still are Caldera):
  Our Eighties business plan seemed good; why permit a change of era?
  That old IP that passed to us seemed ripe for legal mining.
  We're not quite clear on what it is, but it must have been worth buying.
  I look with great anxiety on Linux and on BSD.
  I've signed up with the Devil:  Chairman Bill sent a huge license fee.
  He says he has a high regard for intellectual property,
  But I really haven't thought much what he'll do when he's done with me.

Lawyer Chorus:

  But he really hasn't thought much what he'll do when he's done with him.
  But he really hasn't thought much what he'll do when he's done with him.
  But he really hasn't thought much what he'll do when he's done with him.

McBride:

  Our contract reach is deep and broad, and gives us exclusivity:
  The lawyers tell us to shoot wide.  (Who'll notice things like privity?) 
  From the penguinista rabble, I've earned naught but opprobrium.
  But dare I'll say I'm twice the man of anyone at I-B-M.

Lawyer Chorus:

  But dare'e'll say he's twice the man of anyone at I-B-M.
  But dare'e'll say he's twice the man of anyone at I-B-M.
  But dare'e'll say he's twice the man of anyone at I-B-IBM.

McBride: 

  So though we have run quite amok, we readily will go away,
  If for our worthless capital, you were this tidy sum to pay.
  In short, with markets minuscule and losses quite consecutive,
  I am the very model of a modern SCO executive.

Lawyer Chorus:

  In short, with markets minuscule and losses quite consecutive,
  I am the very model of a modern SCO executive.

Top  /  Email Brian

Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 05, 2003 -    Updates at 0831

Good morning. I'm making a bit of a late start - I slept in an extra hour, as I'm not working out of the house this morning. I'll do some continued remote work on the mailserver, though. With Greg's gracious assistance, I was able to see Postfix, Cyrus, Cyradm and authentication all working properly last night. Today/tonight, there's Spam Assassin and Vexira antivirus to install into the setup, then I can start testing. I don't think I'll be happy to take this server live tomorrow, though, so I'll probably push that out a week.

Ooops, let me run the recycling out to the curb. . . . Thanks. While there's always too much to do, and lots of rushing about to get out in the morning, at least it's a routine, and little gets forgotten. When I'm not in my groove, the cracks through which assorted tasks might tumble become rather larger. With that out of the way, there's a wide variety of assorted things I might accomplish with a relatively free day. The dog could do with a trim, clip and bath. I have errands to run down to the bank and home center. And something or other work-related is bound to turn up.

Kernel upgrade coming down the line, courtesy of an update email (or twenty, given how many accounts I have) that landed in my inbox this morning. Red Hat has published a new kernel for versions 7.1 through 9. Here's the errata page linked. The new version incorporates updates that address vulnerabilities, and some bug fixes. I'm going to start rolling it into systems in the next day or two. You might want to have a look if you're running Red Hat.

With that, I think I'll leave you for now. Have a lovely day, and if anything hyper-interesting crops up, I'll pop in here to say so. Otherwise, mañana!

Top  /  Email Brian

Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
June 06, 2003 -    Updates at 0703

Howdy. It's Friday, and we like that. Indeed, yesterday turned out much as planned, much to my surprise. By shortly after 11 in the morning, the dog had her hair cut, nails trimmed, and a bath. I'd followed that up by cleaning the bathroom (which would otherwise smell like dog for weeks), and gotten my own shower. Then I did the errands. I put in over three hours for work on assorted little tasks, including another couple of hours on that mailserver last night. Everything's done on that except SMTP authentication, which isn't working, for some reason. It'll get puzzled out and/or we'll implement pop-before-smtp authentication. That works to, but I'd rather see something that's supposed to be working, working.

And I managed to weed the tomato bed. Did I mention the first tomato is growing nicely? It's about 3/4" in diameter, and of course it's off of one of the Early Girl plants. I'm stunned that one set at all, given the weather we've been having. Mostly the flowers so far are blooming and falling off, which is as I expected.

Today I'm up in Rockville. setting up that gigabit router I spoke of recently. The dual fiber adapter cards came in yesterday, so this set up just moved to the top of my to-do list. At this moment, the weather outside is glorious, the traffic is said to be light, and I guess I'd better hop in the car and get going that way. Take it easy!

Top  /  Email Brian

Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
June 07, 2003 -    Updates at 0922

Good morning, in an odd sort of way. After a two day hiatus, the rains have returned. No winds at this time, just a steady, heavy downpour. That's gotta be a lovely site up at the FBR Capitol Open, happening up in Montgomery County. Well, it might be happening, or it might not. I'm told that the water table dropped just below the level of the greens on Thursday. I don't know how well balls roll in half an inch or more of standing water, but I can't imagine it's too much fun.

In the overall scheme of things, our weather has been far grayer than not for quite a long time now. I'm keeping up my vitamin D by getting out in the yard and mowing or weeding or something at the occasional break. And occasionally we're blessed with a glorious transition between many clouds and less clouds, as you can see in the snap at left. However, being an inside dog, Sally doesn't really appreciate the sky. She does appreciate rain not falling, only because she's not a water dog. But inside, she manages not only to find some of the most uncomfortable positions, but to actually fall asleep in that fashion. In the picture at right, she'd only just awakened before I snapped the picture.

With all this damp falling from up, Marcia's stayed quite busy with the quilting and clothing thing. At left you can see another of her fine works, a quilted tablecloth. Have you been to her sewing site? It's called Marcia's Makings. While Marcia sews, Sally continues to demonstrate her finest talent. I suspect that if dogs could be authors, that Sally could win a Pulitzer for something along the lines of The Fine Art of Napping.

Building a new Linux router yesterday was fun. The base box is a Dell 600SC, with a 2.4G P4 and just 128M of RAM. Inside the box, there's a 10/100/1000 NIC on the motherboard. Plus we've added three dual Fiber 10/100/1000 boards and one quad copper 10/100/1000 board. The fiber connections are going to service the 5 main sub-nets with a spare handy. We'll use the copper for direct routes as needed. Last week, I installed Debian on the box, in preparation for this week's work. Over the last few days, the add-in cards arrived, so yesterday was bring-up day. We put 4 cards in the chassis and rebooted.

The resultant listing from typing ifconfig -a was less than stellar. We had eth0 through eth6 listed. The quad copper card wasn't being recognized by the e1000 driver from January. I had figured to be running with 2.4.21 anyway, by the time we put this box into production, so I pulled down a 2.4.20 tree, and the 2.4.21-rc7 patch from kernel.org. A quick unpack, patch, configure, make and install later, I'd rebooted again. Unfortunately, the same events followed. Hmmmm. Off we hared to the Intel site, where the gods smiled upon us. A new driver, loadable module only, was released by Intel only days ago. I removed the kernel driver from the mix, built and installed the Intel e1000 driver module and we rebooted again. Waahooo! There they were - eth0 through eth10, standing ready to route, just as soon as we have the hardware that will terminate the other ends of the fiber runs.

One other little task remains. Because there are windows machines on most every subnet, and because we have some COM/DCOM activities to coordinate between the machines, we need a PDC. Worse yet, we need a PDC on every subnet. Now, either we need to put a distinct PDC in each leg, or ... now, stay with me here ... we use the router as a PDC. The latter is exactly the current setup today, but it just provides authentication services today. The new box will actually function as a full PDC. We've installed Samba-3.0-Alpha24, and barely started the doc-reading/system configuring stage by the close of business yesterday. But more fun is coming, I can tell.

In case you noticed last night, yes, Rocket was down for a while. We installed a new kernel into the box, and rebooted. Oddly, it didn't restart nicely. So we put in a reboot ticket with Rackshack. Then the box came up, about 15 minutes later. Thanks, Rackshack. We started looking around, and saw that we were indeed running in the new kernel. How odd, we had set things up to boot just once into the new version, using lilo -R. That way if something failed, we could have Rackshack push the button, and it would come back up into the old kernel... Hey, wait a minute... up flashed a message in our terminal sessions: System is rebooting now.. Thanks, Rackshack.

The system had just taken a really long time to boot, the first time. Then Rackshack techs came along and pushed the button for us, just as we were trying to figure out why some of the services hadn't started up properly. Rackshack noticed that too, and had updated our work ticket, with the intent of doing more troubleshooting. No, thanks. A quick thinking phone-call on Greg's part put paid to that idea, and we went through and brought up all of the non-starter services manually, cleaned things up a bit, and started in on a post-mortem of why the box might have not booted quickly. Additionally, why, on second reboot, it had again booted into the new kernel, even thought the lilo default stanza was specifying the old kernel. We are slightly befuddled at the moment. But we are running the newest, non-vulnerable kernel, and all of our services are up and running. Counting our blessings, we are.

Finally, for now, you may have noticed that I recently updated the Daynotes.org site, moving Moshe Bar's site back into the active list (although his machine is offline just at this very moment, sigh). Acknowledging that Jon Hassell's site is no more, his name remains, but links to nothing at the moment. Jon? Do you have a new site or is your O'Reilly blog still living? I looked for it and could not find it. Finally, Mat Lemmings has been MIA from posting since January, poor fella. The good news is that he's probably been too busy to post. That may be even better news, because if he's working hard, then he can afford to pay for all those bloody auto repairs that seem to plague Chez Lemmings.

I'll bid you adieu for now. Have a lovely day, drier than ours I hope and pray. Take care.

Top  /  Email Brian

Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
June 08, 2003 -    Updates at 0953

Hallo. Today's guest head is none other than Benjamin Franklin. Printer, retailer, publisher, Mason, statesman, philosopher, scientist - Ben Franklin was a witty, bright and well connected individual. One of the "Fathers" of the United States, Franklin is perhaps best widely remembered for a few key achievements. He survived experiments proving that lightning is electricity by flying kites during storms. He was publisher of Poor Richard's Almanac, from whence many of the says widely attributed to Franklin are first found. And he was a member of the committee that composed and wrote the Declaration of Independence. Of course, he did much more, from founding libraries and a fire insurance company to representing the fledgling nation to the court of Louis XVI. Benjamin Franklin is an inspiration to me, to learn more, and do more. A marvelous quote here follows: "If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing." I hope you find him an interesting historical character, as well.

I completed the finishing and assembly of the easel yesterday. You can see it in pictures linked to the right and left. It's stained with an antique cherry finish, then overcoated twice with a water-based polyurethane. It's designed to fold flat, but will also easily dismantle to it's component parts. The purpose of the piece is to hold a large dressing mirror at the right height and angle in our bedroom, and that's what it'll be doing, once the polyurethane has completely cured. I'll move it upstairs later today.

Now, I have a busy, busy day ahead. It'll be full of systems administrative chores. This server (Rocket) didn't reboot properly on Friday night, and we're trying to figure out just why. That's a hard gig when we're in Maryland and Florida, and the server's in Houston. So I'm poring through log files, as well as writing a script to monitor key services and start them up after boot, if the rc3.d files aren't run properly (as it appears happened). Then I've drafted Greg one more time, to help me figure out why SMTP authentication isn't working on the new mail server that he helped me build.

The garage also needs cleaning, and I have to head out to pick up some replacement filters for the HVAC system. I guess I'll shower and do my out-of-house stuff first, then back here for a few hours. See y'all around - more when there's more to tell.

Top  /  Email Brian

Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week

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 © 1999-2003 Brian P. Bilbrey.