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GRAFFITI -- December 01 thru December 07, 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.. |
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December 01, 2003 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. Of course I slept in a bit. Sheesh. Yesterday we got the shopping done. Then I did some more reorganization in the garage, and we now have a two-car garage. Wooo!
On the Linux side, I've got Mandrake 9.2 running on Gryphon the Sony laptop. That's not a permanent state - I'll be taking him over to Debian to stay, shortly. But I wanted to see what the install and the defaults looked like. Short take: It's currently better than Fedora. The install went fairly hitch-free, a couple of confusingly repeated dialogs and I had to press F1 and then type "expert" to get to the custom install. Other than that, it was smooth and no surprises from previous Mandrake installations I've done over the last few years. It's a bit more polished, but then I expected that. More on this later...
Finally, I did some remote work updating and backing up servers at a customer site, from home, using pcAnywhere. It runs pretty well under Crossover Office. Now, I need to get to work. Have a great day!
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December 02, 2003 - Updates at 2108
Sorry for the delay. It's been a busy day. Meantime, Jeremy asked me:
On Tue, 2003-12-02 at 20:44, Jeremy wrote: > what do you think about the SCO case about copyrights?
I think they're nasty greedy bastards who ought to be put up against the wall and shot. Can they convince a judge and jury of their cause. I dunno. There are a LOT of technically-non-savvy jurists and jurors around. I keep hoping for a Judge with a clue to sentence McBride to the bottom of the pond in the waste water treatment facility in Redmond and disbarr Boies on general principles. Of course, he could follow on by outlawing lawyers and bringing back the stocks. But then, I have a dream.
Well, tomorrow's another day. G'night.
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December 03, 2003 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. In all the hustle and bustle of getting back into the working routine, I managed to miss paying attention to our entry into yet another December. Does time fly? Faster each year, methinks. And is it truly December? Yep, here in Maryland it sure is. Over in California, the temps have been hovering at a robust high of about 60 degrees. Here we have highs all week predicted to be at about 40F, and yesterday I woke to a 26 degree brisk putting-out-the-trash-before-leaping-into-the-car-with-the-heater-on-high morning. And by Friday we're due for mixed precipitation. Does that mean snow? Sleet? Rain? Frogs? Hmmmm.
Looking at November's stats, one thing leaps out -- four countries with but one hit apiece: Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ghana, and Nepal. First, I'm not sure how to view my site and only generate one hit. Nearly every page except my start page has an image on it, I think. Ah, maybe it's browsing with image retrieval turned off. Yah, I'm spoiled by broadband.
Next, while I know where the latter three countries were, I was baffled by Burkina Faso. So I googled for a moment, to discover that Burkina Faso is sandwiched by Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Benin to the south, Niger to the east and Mali to the north and west. The country was known in colonial times as Upper Volta. Some bits that jumped out at me when I was reviewing the CIA FactBook entry: Burkina Faso is FLAT! It varies from a low of 200 M to a high of 749 M. With only 549 meters of total vertical over the whole country, this wouldn't be a skier's haven, even if it weren't tropical. The median age there is about 17 (by comparison with the US, which is nearly at 36). Infant mortality is hovering at around 10%, and life expectancy is in the mid to low 40's. I know more than I used to, and now I'll remember it.
In Linux news, there are updates available for most of the major distributions with regard to the kernel vulnerability that some of Debian's servers fell prey to a couple of weeks ago. Note that this is a local root exploit - you have to be able to execute code on the box to get root access. It's been fixed since about September, but the bug was not suspected to be an exploitable vulnerability. Sigh. Debian got nailed by someone sniffing a password, then using that to log onto a Debian server, and install a root kit there, and on three other Debian machines. The main archive machines were not affected, and the security archive was taken offline until all the packages could be crosschecked against multiple clean sources. If this is very important to you, then you're already tracking it deeper than I'll go here. Anyway, update your kernels. 2.4.23 is out and clean - distributions (like Red Hat) are backporting the miniscule patch to their mainline kernels.
How does this affect me? Well, when I blew away Mandrake two nights ago and went to Debian for Gryphon the Sony laptop, after building the box, I got 2.4.23 from kernel.org, and the preemptible kernel patch from Robert Love's page, and rolled my own (as I usually do). Just works. Now I need to get over to a client site - one more machine to migrate over there. Then I'll head back to NERDS central to build a Windows 2003 Advanced Server SBS Premium box for yet another client site. Staying busy is a good thing - it helps pay the mortgage... Have a great day!
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December 04, 2003 - Updates at 0710
Good morning. It is 23 F outside just now. Marcia assures me that it was 20 F this time yesterday. So it really must be winter around here, right? Yes, especially now that the weather liars are starting to mutter about winter storm watches and snow. Where the weather projections for five days out showed rain Thursday night through Sunday, they now have little flakey bits showing in the GIF images. Someone speculated up to 6" of snow, but I see no signs of that in any forecast. Hmmmm.
I spent all of yesterdayz20031201.html working on Windows boxes, and most of today will lean that way as well, but for a different client. On Gryphon, I've got network profiles running from the boot loader again, only under the new Debian install. I'll document those shortly for interested parties. Now it's time to get in the car and drive.
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December 05, 2003 - Updates at 0600
Bloody early, and bloody cold - That's what it is 'ere, mate! We had a few sprinkles of snow-ish looking stuff last night, mostly dropping and melting on the windshield or road. There was only a miniscule accumulation on the yellow paint lines, apparently the coldest bit of country around. That stopped and nothing more happened for hours. But we could watch the stuff approach thanks to my friends at WJLA:
Now, this morning, there's just about 3/4 of an inch of slushy stuff on surfaces that will hold it, like the deck, the porch roof, etc. There's some precipitation going on right now, fairly stiff - a mix of rain and snow or small ice pellets. Also it's considerably warmer - about 34 F this morning - than it has been this week so far. The road is clear out front, and I expect to be out there shortly, beating the slow, scared traffic to my destination.
This popped into my mailbox last night: Find your Middle Earth name. Thanks, Tara. Did you know that I was an Evil Hill Troll? Apparently I am. A suitable Elvish name for me is Telmorgûl How lovely.
How did I do those network profiles in Debian? Here's the drill: First, in /etc/network, I create a directory called profiles. Within, I put a subdirectory for each network profile I'm going to create. I have several, for home, office, repeat client sites, etc. In each of these places, I have an assigned IP, different name servers, variations in the hosts file. Here's what my /etc/network/profiles/home directory looks like:
gryphon:/etc/network/profiles/home# ls -al
total 13
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 136 Dec 2 08:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 168 Dec 3 19:40 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 312 Dec 2 08:29 hosts
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 402 Dec 2 08:21 interfaces
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45 Dec 2 08:28 resolv.conf
From there, those files are symlinked to their proper locations in the /etc and /etc/network directories. When I want to change horses in mid-stream (say, change from one internal network to another) I can use the following script I put in /usr/local/bin:
#!/bin/bash
export PROFILE_PATH="/etc/network/profiles/$1"
if [ -e $PROFILE_PATH ]
then
/etc/init.d/networking stop
cd /etc
rm hosts resolv.conf
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/hosts .
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/resolv.conf .
cd network
rm interfaces
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/interfaces .
/etc/init.d/networking start
exit 0
fi
echo "$1 network profile doesn't exist. Pull the other one..."
exit 1
That stops the current networking setup, blows away the old symlinks, and builds the new ones before restarting networking. By contrast, at boot time, I have for each network profile a modified Grub (boot loader) entry, like this one for home:
title 2.4.23-home
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.23 root=/dev/hda1 hdc=ide-scsi netprofile=home
That netprofile=home argument is interpreted by an init script:
#! /bin/sh
#
# this init script sets up network profiles from a netprofile variable appended
to the boot line in grub or lilo.
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
SETSCRIPT=/usr/local/bin/nswset
# Boot time network profiles.
if grep -q "netprofile=" /proc/cmdline ; then
cmdline=`cat /proc/cmdline`
for arg in $cmdline ; do
if [ "${arg##netprofile=}" != "${arg}" ]; then
[ -x $SETSCRIPT ] &&
$SETSCRIPT ${arg##netprofile=}
fi
done
fi
I've got a symlink to that at /etc/rcS.d/S37setnetprofile, running after mountall, but before the networking gets rolling. The nswset script referenced therein is a subset of the on-the-fly changing script:
#!/bin/bash
export PROFILE_PATH="/etc/network/profiles/$1"
if [ -e $PROFILE_PATH ]
then
cd /etc
rm hosts resolv.conf
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/hosts .
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/resolv.conf .
cd network
rm interfaces
ln -s $PROFILE_PATH/interfaces .
exit 0
fi
echo "$1 network profile doesn't exist. Pull the other one..."
exit 1
The only difference there is that I don't stop or start networking. This support script is just profile configuration. I probably ought to reconfigure the first script to simply call the second... yeah. Anyway, that's all there is to that. Hope someone finds it useful.
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December 06, 2003 - Updates at 0850
Snow day. Ah, but not a working day, so there's precious little payoff. And since I'm not salaried, I'd work from here if I could, so a snow day doesn't do me the same honor that it grants the smallest Who in Whoville - a day off of who-school. So Sally encouraged us to haul out of bed as she was dancing around with her legs crossed. Marcia made the leap first, and so went downstairs to let doglette out. "Oh, ho!" I heard float up the stairs. Lots of snow, and Sally gallumping around in it trying to find ANY of her bathroom spots. I wandered into my office, opened the blind and shot a couple of pictures from up here. She was bouncing around pretty well out there - fairly spry for an old gal.
From the front porch, I shot pictures up and down the street. Then I put down the camera, pulled on hat and gloves and shovel. Now I was equipped to clean off part of the back decking and steps to make it easier for Sally to ascend and descend. Overall, we've taken about 6" of snow here overnight, and another 3/4" fell between shovelling and this point in time. It's supposed to taper off pretty quickly though. I'll believe that when I see it. The real problem from my perspective is that the high temperature today is barely going to clear freezing, then drop back into the mid-20's tonight. But we're supposed to drive down into the district for supper. Seems like a non-starter to me - I'd be worried about icing on the roads. We'll see....
Yesterday was a good day, work-wise. We installed a Thawte certificate for a Java servlet engine and got that going. Then I built a new debian box that's going to sit in a protected DMZ and provide cross-departmental support of several kinds. It's a fun project - next week I'll start configuring services on it, and start installing apps and adding firewall rules and all the fun stuff attendent thereupon.
SCO Smackdown! Utah District Court Judge Brooke Wells effectively told SCO to put up or shut up, yesterday. Here's a report on the matter at Groklaw. How, um, interesting. It's also intriguing that Boise and company, who stand to get 20% of the company in any sale while litigation is pending, didn't bother to put in an appearance at this apparently crucial hearing. Instead, it was Darl McBride's brother, Kevin, ranting on off the top of his head at the Judge. Hmmm. January may be an interesting month in the SCO v. IBM case.
Now I'm going to get out my snow blower, and take care of the driveway. Have a great day!
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December 07, 2003 - Updates at
Good morning... maybe. Okay, so it's late enough in the day, and I suppose I should be up, and I am, but I'm not totally happy about that. I'm in one of those moods where I could happily sleep away most of the day, interspersed only with brief periods of intermittent napping and the occasional snooze. But that's not to be. Today we're going to do a brief shopping run, then head up to Reisterstown to meet with some Cocker spaniels. We might get another dog today. Who knows?
Yesterday was nice - We had a reasonably relaxing day after my less-than-tough hour spent walking behind the snow blower. Definitely a treat after last year's shovelling escapades. I did use the shovel to do a final skim clean up, but that took only 10 minutes. The whole job, including all the sidewalks only took me an hour. Excellent. Then, in the evening, we met Marcia's coworkers and their spice (spouses?) for a marvelous supper at Michel Richard Citronelle, down in Georgetown. Exquisite food in good portions for if-you-have-to-ask prices. Superb service, no rush, no fuss. We sat and talked and laughed and ate for nearly 4 hours. Recommended.
I've got to get ready, but I'll leave you with another picture from our trip to North Carolina. Here Malcolm's decided that while we're having a nice scratch/snuggle on the sofa, that he needs to keep his eyes open in case I need protecting from something... Meantime, you have a great day!
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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.
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