|
|
HomeGraffitiAboutSitemapVisualDevWork
Email BrianGPG Key |
GRAFFITI -- June 23 thru June 29, 2003>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week 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 23, 2003 - Updates at 0708 EST
Good morning. It's the first Monday of Summer, and it looks like it might really be summer out there. It's clear, still and sunny, with the promise of highs near 90 and humidity to match. At least this humidity won't be falling out of the sky - and our garden can sure use the sunlight to do some photosynthesising.
Larry and I slogged away at that mailserver until 1815 last night, and got it most of the way there. Cyrus is authenticating and imapping, but won't allow user creation of new imap folders: there's a permissions problem there to be found. More worrisome, Postfix is throwing errors when it tries to do ... something, but it isn't behaving as an MTA yet. So there's a little exploratory work to do there yet, too. It's very close though. I'll work on it tonight - Today is for Rockville and continued network design.
There's precious little else to tell at this juncture. So I'll leave you to your Monday and hope that it goes as well for you as might be expected. Ta.
Mon
TUESDAY
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
June 24, 2003 - Updates at 0720
Good morning. So sorry for the delay, my morning post time has been eaten by battling a DOS attack on Rocket. We're still diagnosing, but we've blocked a couple of IP addresses to bring the load down while we look at the Apache config and logs to see where the problem lies. Yesterday went well, today in the office looks hopeful - I hope your day goes as well. See ya!
Mon
Tues
WEDNESDAY
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
June 25, 2003 - Updates at 2035
Good evening. I've just stopped moving, for the first moment since about six thirty this morning. Whew. So I guess you could call it a no-post day, except for this. More tomorrow morning, for sure. G'night.
Mon Tues Wed
THURSDAY Fri Sat Sun
June 26, 2003 - Updates at 0637
Good morning. Thanks for your patience yesterday. I was reminded on several occasions about the missing post, but work and life kept gettin in the way. That's okay, it happens sometimes. Night before last was the first really warm evening of the year, and we were up late-ish because it's hard getting used to going to sleep in the heat, again.
I did finish, the other night, reading the last half of Mort, followed by a first delving into the new Potter book. I finished about a hundred pages there, then came upstairs and read Sourcery (another Pratchett) in bed. More Pratchett last night, and eventually, perhaps on the weekend, I'll sit back down with Rowlings' latest and finish it all the way to the back plate.
Yesterday, I got the router routing, but am currently stumped by VLAN implementations. If any reader out there has set up and configured a moderately complex VLAN, especially with GVRP (VLAN learning mode, switch style), I'd be interested in asking a couple of really basic questions. I'd be even more impressed if I heard from someone who'd used a Linux router in conjunction with a VLAN configuration. We could accomplish what we want with subnets, but that's plain ugly when we can do the same with VLANs.
Late in the afternoon yesterday, I did a three hour stint at a NOW client who needed help resurrecting a couple of ailing Dell boxes. We got halfway there when we learned that his laptop was dying the death, and his cable connection was down. So he's hunting up a couple of install CDs we needed, and I'll be going there mid-morning today for a couple more hours. So in total, it'll be a three-stop day today - I'm tired just thinking about it.
That said, I suppose I'd best get to it, since I have to tank up the car on my way. You have a great day, please..
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
FRIDAY
Sat
Sun
June 27, 2003 - Updates at 0701
Good morning, more or less. The more part comes from it being Friday and all. That's more than the usual blessed relief. TGIF, people! The less part, well that stems from it being our first real bout with hot weather since early last fall. At the best of times, I don't sleep well in the warm, and that is especially true when I've got to get used to it all over again. It will get easier as the summer drags along, I'm sure. But honestly, if given the choice between too hot and too cold, I'll take the latter any day. I can always put on more clothes. But if this is just for starters then I might be ready to flay my skin off before this gig's over.
Okay, I exaggerate, but then I did go out and mow the lawn when I got home late yesterday afternoon. That's pretty sweaty work. By sundown, the temperatures upstairs here started to drop below 90. Tonight I'm hopeful (but not very hopeful) of cooling the upstairs down to less than 80 before bedtime. It can be easily done by running the AC on high constantly, but we're not doing that in hopes of saving on the electric bill. We keep the thermostat set at between 78 and 80, making the downstairs almost comfortable in shorts and a tanktop. Upstairs stays an oven until sundown, when I pop all the windows and start moving air through with box fans. That worked for a while, but around 10 we closed everything back up and ramped the AC down for a while to get the upstairs cool enough to sleep in. It was either that, or try to type this post this morning with my forehead.
I have a number of projects, any one or more of which I might have worked on last night. Instead, I vegetated. Following the shearing of the grass, I rested until I was cool enough to shower. After, I had supper and read for a bit. Sorry, that's about as exciting as it gets. Oh, wait...
Here's something that I want to get gobbled up by Google: The configuration is Debian-stable (3.0), minimal install, with a few bits around for building packages. Installed from source are DB4, Cyrus-SASL, Cyrus-imapd, Postfix, Pam_mysql, and Web-Cyradm. When all was said, done and configured, there were some bits that didn't work right, and it was hard debugging them. It took Greg to find the final piece. If you're using Postfix and Cyrus and virtual users, and local aliases don't work, then perhaps this will help.
We had configured in /etc/postfix/main.cf for local_transport=cyrus. That didn't work, nor did local_transport=lmtp. Nope, we had to comment out the local_transport line altogether. Then Postfix started paying heed to the setups in /etc/postfix/aliases, and all was right with the world. But finding that scrap of information took forever, and we don't know why having it there was a problem, nor do we know why commenting it out make the problem disappear. I'll be looking into that in the fine manuals in the days to come. Otherwise a close cousin of that problem will swing around and bite me in the ass one day soon.
Jon Hassell, he of the freshly re-minted Daynotes site, offered a leg up with VLANs, I'll be trying a couple of things and dropping him an email or three from the client site today. Thanks, Jon! Roland Dobbins also chimed in with some sage advice about not using the learning features (GVRP) at all, as they're a security risk waiting to swing in from stage left. Say, while I'm on the asking-for-help binge, has anyone besides me had trouble setting up CUPS? I configure it to talk to a Tek Phaser 850 or 860 and the stinking software sends copy after copy of what I'm printing to the device. Sheesh. That's significant because most of my time is spent in two places where Phasers live, and I can't print directly. I'm probably going to take the time today to setup LPRNG and be done with it. But really, it shouldn't be happening, and Google's no help at all.
Have a lovely day, I'm going to get on the road. See ya!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
SATURDAY
Sun
June 28, 2003 - Updates at 0936
Good morning. I opened the editor to start this post just minutes before 0600 today. I was awake and up with Sally at that hour. But then Marcia called Sally back to bed, and I decided the better part of valour would be served if I were well rested, so I slept for another two hours. Then I got up again, did a few dishes and made the coffee. Now I feel much less awake and alert than I did at 6 this morning. Odd, that.
Yesterday went well. The VLAN setup started working. I don't know about the VLAN tools in Linux - we decided to do without that, and just used dedicated tagged ports from the master switch up to the router. Then pretty much everything started working like a charm. For dessert, I setup one of the new workstations that we'll be installing for this customer. It's a Dell box, with a 2.66 Gig Xeon, 2 Gig of RAM, and a quad-head Appian Rushmore card driving four 19" Dell flat panel displays. As configured, it runs them a tad less than 6 grand per workstation. One thing that we were testing for the first time was the Rushmore card in this particular Dell workstation. Worked like a champ after a couple of install/reboot cycles. Sweet system.
An article on international copyright turned up in front of my eyes courtesy of a post to the CBP mailing list. The article, Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright, is found on MSN's Slate site, and asks the interesting question yet again: How much intellectual property enforcement is too much? The funny thing is, some of the international works that Rowling has had put down would be protected as parody here in the states. It's a worthwhile read.
SF Bay Area residents: Rep. Anna Eshoo (geshundit) is having a pancake breakfast and Town Hall meeting over at Argonaut Elementary School in Saratoga this morning. If you just like pancakes, or perhaps want to give her some input on issues that you care about, like the DMCA, privacy and other issues that Congress is going to be dealing with in the next couple of sessions, then make your move. BTW, I hear that the pancakes aren't free, so you'd better bring a few bucks, too.
The 2003 Bulwer-Lytton contest (website here) draws to a close on Monday. I bring this up because I received in the mail the other day a copy of the winners submissions. Unfortunately, I misplaced that email through an over-zealous folder deletion. So I went hunting, and found that the email just might have been premature. So keep your eye on that place, there will be some new astonishingly bad prose popping up there shortly. Hey, you in the back, stop saying that I should enter this whole site, alright?
Now it's time to shift this day into drive. Enjoy your weekend, and I'll see you tomorrow, or soon thereafter.
Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat
SUNDAY
June 29, 2003 - Updates at 1027
Good day. Today's guest head is none other than Harlow Shapley. As an astronomer working in the early 20th century, his discoveries about Cepheid variable stars were the key to understanding the distances and scale of our galaxy. He is perhaps most famous for his debate with Heber Curtis in 1920. My first introduction to Shapley came via Larry Niven's science fiction, with Pierson's Puppeteers fleeing the exploding Shapley center of our own Galaxy. Whoops, and who's this Shapley fella? I would "surf" for information links long before there was a web. Anyway, there's lots to learn and interesting links to follow when you track into Harlow Shapley. Have fun!
I got lots done yesterday, from a spot or two of yard work, to laundry, to some web work for ETS, to chocolate chip cookies... We had Chinese take-out for supper, then Marcia and I both did some project work in the evening. A busy day but not hard to describe. Today we've got shopping, then I don't know what. I do have to do a check run today for the bills. So it's boring. Sorry. I hope your day is more exciting than ours. See ya!
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.
