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GRAFFITI -- May 05, 2008 thru May 11, 2008>> 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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May 5, 2008
2118 - Good evening. It's Cinco de Mayo. Since I'm not part of that demographic, that means, don't go to a Mexican place for lunch or dinner, it'll be too crowded. Like the day we took Mike out for his birthday to Chevy's. Big mistake (and I think the waitstaff had been sampling the margaritas) — it took about two hours to get served lunch. Yeah, that means it's his birthday again, Happy Birthday, Mike. I hope you don't feel bad that I remember your birthday only because of how long it took to get lunch that day! Grin.
Also today, Sun released OpenSolaris "Indiana". I'm not quite sure about the name, but it's supposed to be good. I pulled it down during the day today, it took over six minutes (!) at 1.84 MB/s. Shameful, really. Since it's a "Live CD", I think I'll burn a copy and muck around with it a bit ... in a bit. All of the Monday chores are done, though. I'd play with it in VMware Server, but that didn't survive the transition to the Hardy Heron release. Maybe there's an upgrade by now...
Well, off to see the Wizzard! Oh, yeah, I have a firewall update to push... WTF happened to the pager alert I setup today? Ciao!
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May 6, 2008
1844 - Good evening. I'm listening tonight to a bunch of Bach ... so it's time for a change. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. On the VMware front, I was successful, but before I had a chance to say so here, Jerry McVey dropped me a line that would have been right useful had I been lazier in practicing some late Google-fu last night....
Saw on your site you tried the lastest Ubuntu and ran into problems with VMware. I've been looking into this as well since we run Ubuntu on a few machines but absolutely need VMware Server working on those boxes. Found a few links (both from within the Ubuntu forums and VMware's forums) that point to:
http://www.bauer-power.net/2008/04/installing-vmware-server-on-ubuntu-804.html
Seems there's a way to get it working via using the any-any patch and copying a few files around. If you're running the server version of Ubuntu, that page has a link with a means to get that working as well.
To be honest, we haven't tried this yet (no time and the 'old' version of Ubuntu is working well enough) but hopefully in your free schedule (you really don't need to sleep do you?) you can try and post if this really works or not.
Good luck if you venture down that road... we'll be following shortly and hopefully not falling into the same potholes.
Jer
I just wrote back, thanking him, and pointing out this Make Tech Easier blog post. I found that after some Googling and Ubuntu forum spelunking (or is that spelinking? Damn, I wasn't even nearly the first to coin that sniglet. Anyway, VMware's running fine, thanks, and after I have a bite to eat, I'll give the OpenSolaris thing a go. It might be tricky &mdash this system thinks that k3b made two coasters in a row of the ISO. Sure, I guess, but on Taiyo Yuden media? I think not...
More later, or as the mood strikes. Ciao!
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May 7, 2008
OpenSolaris Indiana LiveCD Gnome Desktop |
Installing OpenSolaris Indiana from the LiveCD |
2111 - Good evening. So the OpenSolaris Indiana install went okay yesterday evening, as did the BIOS update I applied to Magickthyse. Err, jumped the gun again. When you last saw your anti-hero, he was dangling over a virtual (machine) precipice, ready to pitch a dodgy ISO and hope for the best. OpenSolaris says that there's a microcode BIOS patch that'd be a REALLY good idea to install - I guess it's in the latest from Asus for my A8N-E mobo, so I put it in my mind to get to that before the evening ended. Then I clicked on the Install OpenSolaris icon on the LiveCD desktop (!!!), and walked through a fairly standard short-form installer, reminicient of Xandros. It's running, in the shot at the right.
Those are screenshots from VMware Server. My downfall with that is that I always, always, always CTRL-ALT out of the VM window, and promptly click on the "Snapshot" button in the VMware Server Console application. No, not "Screenshot"... "Snapshot", as in, make a snapshot of this system running at this point in time. Sigh. Takes a lot longer to complete than a screenshot (aka VM -> Capture Screen), too.
It also takes longer to install a CD's worth of goo from OpenSolaris into a VM than any other LiveCD I've worked with in the past. But differences are to be expected. There were some unexpected results, though.
Once the install was done, it booted right up after warning me again about that AMD errata, and all looked good. I clicked on the Firefox browser icon, and got the on-system home page. I followed one of the built-in OpenSolaris bookmarks ... and got nowhere. I poked around for a while, and found that while the there was a "Magic" network service (nwamd) that corresponded to a dhcp wrapper of some kind, it didn't write a /etc/resolv.conf file from the dhcp results. So, no name servers, no joy. Hurdle one solved. I don't know how nwamd was supposed to do that right, I did figure out how to shut that off and use the Gnome-ish network configuration tools to setup the virtual ethernet adapter, and after rebooting to make it believe what I told it, the interface was live with the IP I gave it, and there was a resolv.conf file with the correct entries in it.
I fired off the browser again. Thud. Same results. Hmmm. I could ping. I could do host lookups and get a reply for google.com from the command line. But when I put google.com into the browser ... PHAIL! There's a limited set of stuff that can cause problems like that, and since I already knew that the rest of the options were pretty much working okay, I went straight to the source of the problem.
There's a file in most *NIX-like systems that tells it how to resolve addresses - which things to look for, in which order. There's local hosts files, DNS servers, NIS and NIS+ servers, AD and who knows what all else. The /etc/nsswitch.conf file was full of this:
...
passwd: files
group: files
hosts: files
ipnodes: files
networks: files
protocols: files
rpc: files
ethers: files
netmasks: files
bootparams: files
publickey: files
...
There were other entries, too, but this is just a Fair Use excerpt, since the maroons put nsswitch.conf under the CDDL (yeah, a legacy text configuration file), and I can't be bothered to look up what my rights are under that licence. I may not have been allowed to modify it, for all I know. But I did, and added " dns" at the end of the "hosts: files" line. Bang, browsing started working. I wouldn't expect anyone who wasn't a *NIX admin to figure that one out. Sigh - simple stuff screwed up causes two worries. One - what else is screwed up? And two - it's gonna be hard to get early adopters talking happy if they have to battle simple stuff just to get online.
There are upsides, though. Bootable ZFS primary storage! That's awesome. It's so easy to add more storage to ZFS that I can't begin to describe how nice this is going to be. It's Gnome on the front end. That's not terrible - KDE's in a state of deep flux at the moment, settling into 4.1, and there's no one who ever wants to see CDE ever again. I'll spend some time looking at it over the next few days and report on what I find as I go. I should go find out how to report my initial problems so that they can fix the next release/update.
There was another "postcard" malware email in my box this evening. When I hover my mouse over the link, it says http://blah-blah-blah.com/postcard.gif.exe in the status bar. You know, what you see if you have "Hide file types" configured in your Windows folder view (still the default, sigh), all you'd see is the postcard.gif part, and maybe think that gif images were safe. Nothing's safe. Most eCards today are not cards, but link scam to get you to install malware on your system. If you don't know how to safely tell good from bad, you just don't dare follow ANY links like that, ever. Not if it's from your daughter, niece, wife, etc. I hate to screw up the legitimate eCard business, but if you "train" your friends and family to open eCards by sending them a lot, then someday they'll click on one that isn't from you, and their machine will be turned into a key-logging, identity-thieving, spambot ... and it'll be your fault. So don't send eCards, and discourage your friends and family from opening them. Of course, if you, your friends, and your family are all Linux users, disregard what I just said - be careful, don't execute things you get in the mail (EXE files CAN be run by WINE, you know), and - oh, yeah - be careful. Someday bad stuff our way comes, too.
Ciao!
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May 8, 2008
2215 - Good evening. I got Jerry's column formatted and posted. I did a spot of work. I watched CSI with Marcia and Linda. Poof, the evening ... she's gone.
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May 9, 2008
0855 - Good morning. Today is Marcia's knee surgery. More news on that late in the day, after we're back home. In a minute here, I'm going to go downstairs, dig out and clean up her crutches.
It rained last night. In April, we took 4.52 inches here according to my gauge. Last night before bed, the cumulative total stood at 4.60, not much rain in the first part of May. This morning, the reading is 6.80, so we got 2.2 inches overnight. Not too shabby. But the lawn is going to grow like jungle...
2212 - Good evening. We got home a bit past five this afternoon. The surgury went fine - repairs to major torn medial and minor torn lateral meniscus in the left knee. Recovery from anesthesia was shorter than usual, and uneventful. I'm going to be busy with icepacks and med dispensation over the next couple of days...
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May 10, 2008
Whoops!......
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May 11, 2008
1418 - Good afternoon. I intended to post yesterday, really I did. What with keeping track of ice/no ice and medication schedules, the day got away with me. And we weren't there, but congrats to Tim Otis and his new bride, Mary — Tim's a bloke I worked with at NFR; they tied the knot yesterday afternoon.
Today is Mother's Day. We have dogs, apparently that counts. So I got up, made coffee and breakfast, then brought it upstairs for Marcia. She shared a bit of that with the muttlies. Then I did the shopping, the mowing, and the laundry (the last load is in the dryer now). I then called my mom, and let her know all this, and apologized for not doing any of that at her house. So she had to take the deed for the thought.
Another week gone by, more lives lost to the meat grinder in the Middle East. Our condolences to the families and units of our fallen heroes.
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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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