Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Encryption

Journal Journal: Insert regex here for GPG and PGP 1

Memo to myself: Don't eat the Turkey sashimi.

In other news: I don't usually post links to things just to say "go read this". However, I'll make an exception in these cases.

First, I was recently going to use the word "Manichean" to mean "dualistic, good-vs-evil view of the universe, with an implied inevitable battle between the two". However, when I Googled for it to check the spelling, I came across this article explaining why that wasn't a terribly accurate use of the word. Interesting stuff...I certainly didn't know there were any Buddhist-influenced ascetics hanging around Baghdad in the 3rd century.

Second, there's some interesting and contradictory stuff on the procedures for GPG/PGP keysigning parties here and here. Why does publicizing a public key "slightly reduce the security of a key pair"? I don't know. I've had a quick look through my copy of Applied Cryptography (3rd Ed.), donated by the kind man behind Pangolin Systems, but can't find anything from Saint Bruce about this. Anyone?

Third, there's an excellent set of tools for keysigning parties available here. One of the people who signed my key at LISA had used caff to send it back, which is a nice wrapper around the whole procedure (grab the key, sign the key, encrypt the key with itself, email it back to each of the key's email addresses). The lack of understandable (but see next paragraph's self-ass-kicking) documentation for GPG means that a) this automation is very nice, and b) I'm kicking myself for not buying Michael Lucas' book from the No Starch Press booth at LISA.

Fourth, if'n you've got GPG, it's worth reading the documentation, like the FAQ or the GNU Privacy Handbook. Shame on me for not doing that previously. (And shame on me for taking so long to email people's keys back to them.)

Fifth, you can find some pretty stats here, or the trust path from me to Wietse Venema. Geek Pride!

Sixth and finally, there is this handy little page about how to set up a CPAN library in your home directory. Since it took me a while to track this down, I'm throwing it in here so's I can find it quicker next time.

Software

Journal Journal: Sweet Odin's Raven! 2

I've just come across AsciiDoc, and this is SO CLOSE to what I want: Ascii-based markup, still intelligible, and rendered into pretty CSS-compliant whatnot.

For a while now I've been toying with the idea of leaving WordPress behind and just writing all my stuff in Emacs, the way RMS intended, and converting it all to pretty HTML through <handwave>some sort of script or Makefile</handwave>. But this...this is perfect. See this? If it were a black monolith orbiting Jupiter, I would say "My God, it's full of stars!" It's clean, it's spare, it looks good, and it does not require verdammnt patching to stop it from throwing in br tags every time it sees a newline. And you know what it requires? Python! That's it!

I know what you're saying: this is like wiki markup without the wiki. EXACTLY! It's easy to write, easy to read, it looks good and it's just static: no PHP remote inclusion waiting to happen, no heavy load, just simple plain text and html. Oh yes.

Perl

Journal Journal: WWW::Mechanize and the values of testing

One of the great things about going to LISA is that you get the proceedings and/or training for everything on CD or dead tree. (Well, nearly everything...I've heard that some people didn't or couldn't make their training materials available (though I've not been motivated to confirm this yet), and some of the talks didn't do this (Tom, where are your slides?)). There is some wonderful stuff to be found in them...

...like WWW::Mechanize, which is just perfect for testing out this conference registration form I'm working on. Only I've run into a bug that comes when trying to specify which button to click on:

$agent->click_button(value => 'Okay to submit');

That li'l chunk gave me this error:

Can't call method "header" on an undefined value at /home/admin/hugh/perl/lib/perl5/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 2003.

One guy reported the same trouble, but got no response. And the RT queue is fulla spam.

But aha, I found out how to use the Perl debugger in Emacs (M-x perldb. Shhhh!) and was able to track things down. Turns out there are a couple things going on:

  1. In the page that I'm parsing, there are actually two forms, not one; one sends you back to correct mistakes, one sends you forward to keep going. Since I was not specifying which one to use, it used the first...and in that one, there is no button labelled "Okay to submit". One I specified the right form ($agent->form_number(2);) everything was good.
  2. But of course, this sort of thing shouldn't happen, right? Right.

There are a couple subroutines/methods in this module that aren't testing for the right number of arguments. One of 'em is click_button, which has this loop:

my $request;
.
.
.
elsif ( $args{value} ) {
my $i = 1;
while ( my $input = $form->find_input(undef, 'submit', $i) ) {
if ( $args{value} && ($args{value} eq $input->value) ) {
$request = $input->click( $form, $args{x}, $args{y} );
last;
}
$i++;
} # while
} # $args{value}

return $self->request( $request );

No test/case for not finding a button named whatever, so it just blithely returns $self->request( $request ). But of course, request does the same thing:

sub request {
my $self = shift;
my $request = shift;

$request = $self->_modify_request( $request );

if ( $request->method eq "GET" || $request->method eq "POST" ) {
$self->_push_page_stack();
}

$self->_update_page($request, $self->_make_request( $request, @_ ));
}

Again, no test for the right number of arguments. And having just read the Test::Tutorial manpage, I'm all about unit testing and such, baby.

GNU is Not Unix

Journal Journal: My Street 1

Cities and circles drawn perfect, complete
These are the fables on my street, my street, my street
"My Street", The New Pornographers

Okay, my (lawyers, please note) TOTALLY ACCIDENTAL stalking of Tom Limoncelli continues. I met another sysadmin from Boston (who, BTW, is into LISP. Call that accidental? 'Cos I don't) (alsoplus he's the third guy I've met from a small shop, which is damned reassuring in a conference full o'people from multi-continent corporations/teams) who invited me along to the LOPSA hospitality room. I talked to David Parter from LOPSA about why I should join. He also gave me the sad news that the Burritos-as-big-as-your-head place in Madison, WI is closed. Noooooo!

Nice bunch of people, who'll probably be getting a membership fee from me post-haste. Totally unrelated to the free beer. I met a guy from a Scandinavian hosting company that has, like, 300,000 domains (!). We talked about spam for a while, and PHP's ability to include files remotely (he's a big fan. Oh, wait, no) ("When I meet the guy who put that in..." "You'll punch him in the cock?" "Oh, that's just the start of it."), and Perl vs. C vs. LISP vs. Dvorak keyboards vs. I don't know what all.

And who else is in the room AND stared at my badge trying to figure out who the hell I was? That's right, Tom! Still no chance to lean over casually and say, "So I hear Google's trying to figure out what to about TCP scalability bringdown. 'Cos, like, my enterprise-fu PHP taint mode will totally nebbish your gubbins. Scalable. Solution. Moving forward. Come back!"

Also went to the: Free Beer and Ice Cream BOF, PGP/CACert BOF, and the Bash scripting BOF. Last challenge: using Bash built-ins only, check to see if a given TCP port on a given host is open. Welp, I did know about Bash's built-in /dev/tcp/host/port, but totally foundered on syntax. We were told to email our scripts to polvi.net...which sounded familiar, and it should, 'cos was Alex Polvi, who works at Oregon State University Open Source Lab, they who provide bandwidth to such as Gentoo, Mozilla and Kerneltrap. At one point, a few friends of his came in and sat down close to where I was, and he came over and talked to them during one of the challenges. "I think everyone would get freaked out if they knew a Google recruiter was here," he said, laughing. Worked for me.

And, BTW, I thought I was at least quarter-decent at Bash. Hah! It is to laugh.

Quickies

Journal Journal: Letter From An Occupant

What the last ten minutes have taught me:
Bet the hand that your money's on
"Letter From An Occupant", The New Pornographers

Attended my first BOF last night on wikis for sysadmin documentation -- amazingly fun and informative. I even managed to contribute to the conversation. And when I told the war story about recovering my wiki from spammers (that's right! because PHPWiki sucks!) I got a gratifying look of sympathy from the audience.

Today's talk was "Habits of Highly Effective Sysadmins". It was aimed at folks like me who've been mostly self-taught, and I thought they hit the mark extremely well. (I've heard lots of people here say that they'll go see anything put on by Lee Damon or Mike Ciavarella just on principal (principle?).) Very, very informative and great teachers, too.

I found out today that Tom Limoncelli's name is pronounced "li-mon-sell-ee", not "li-mon-chell-ee". W/luck, this will save me embarassment later.

Tonight the BOFs start in earnest, including the one that offers free beer and ice cream. Sadly, I will be attending the one on pet counting instead. I will die a little bit inside.

United States

Journal Journal: Choose It

Two sips from the cup of human kindness, and I'm shit-faced
Just laid to waste
If there's a choice between chance and flight,
Choose it tonight.
"Choose It", The New Pornographers

Just got back from a whirlwind walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument to the White House. Beautiful, all of it...though a) the White House is small and b) there was something being filmed/videotaped in the courtyard, which made me think of Vancouver.

Training again. AFrisch was good, convering Cfengine quite well; would've liked to see more info about expect. (Apparently there are Perl/Python bindings...I had no idea.) Afternoon course was "Interviewing For System Administrators" by FIXME, and that was great -- lots of things I didn't know, lots of tips on doing it better next time.

Saw Tom Limoncelli in the hall during a break. Managed to restrain myself. I have the reputation for quiet restraint of a nation to uphold.

Very tired now. Time to go get beer.

Sun Microsystems

Journal Journal: Bones of an Idol(2) 1

As we sift through the bones of an idol<
We dig for the bones of an idol
When the will is gone
'Cause something keeps turning us on
"Bones of an Idol", The New Pornographers

Today was Solaris 10 Administration, an all-day course that introduced all the nifty features of Solaris 10. I've only worked with Solaris since July, but I've been reading so much about Solaris 10 that most of the stuff presented (dtrace, SMF, zones) was familiar to me. OTOH, the course was aimed at admins of older versions of Solaris (2.veryearly through 8 and 9), and so the explanation of the differences assumed a lot more familiarity with Solaris than I had. It was a curious sensation.

Still, though, it was worth going to. Good quote: "Oracle DBAs are the most Kool-Aid drinking people I've ever met." And another: "Zones are the most controversial thing we'll be talking about today, and spending the most time on. I saw someone carrying two cups of coffee -- that's the right attitude." Also, Bill Lefebvre, the man I was going to accuse of stealing my underwear, wrote top(1).

Oh, and it's a good thing I brought a second wireless network card; the onboard one in the laptop kept dying, with an entry in syslog that read "fatal firmware error". Now I've got an Orinoco Gold in here, and it's working just fine.

Met a sysadmin today who works in the VOIP department of a phone company; they've moved most of their stuff from racks and racks of old-style Alcatel equipment to one rack of Solaris machines acting as soft switches. I was curious about the difference in reliability and uptime; my understanding is that the demands on telecom equipment are worlds above anything that can be provided by COTS Unix, and asked him how it worked for them.

He said that, yes, you'd get situations where a phone call would be delayed because of a system crash: instead of taking one second to connect, it might take two or even three. And if that was anything beyond a small fraction of their customers, that would be a big problem. However, the soft switches had much better failover ability than the old stuff; the old stuff would be up much longer, but when it failed everything would cascade and the whole system would come tumbling down, at which point a customer would hear "Your call cannot be completed as dialed."

Met another guy who was very excited about ZFS, because of an app at his work that writes 4 TB of data in individual 4 KB files. The best they've heard from their current storage vendor of choice is a block size of 8 KB...which means doubling their storage requirements just to deal with filesystem overhead.

I had alligator jumbalaya. It's official: it tastes like salty chicken.

United States

Journal Journal: Jackie

Jackie, you yourself said it best when you said
There's been a break in the continuum
The United States used to be lots of fun...
"Jackie", The New Pornographers

10am CST: Welp, I'm in the air on my way to Chicago, and from thence to Washington for LISA. The laptop is running well (stress-tested by Sloan, The New Pornographers and Yo La Tengo), and I'm using my time to skip watching "Lady in the Water" (not how I want to see this film for the first time) and work on AsciiDoc. I think this is going to work pretty well for my plan: to start having my blog in just plain text for source, and plain HTML for output. I like it a lot, and the less PHP I have to audit the happier I am. (Not that I *do* audit PHP. But I feel guilty when I don't.)

Turned out I was rather stupidly cautious at the airport. The flight left at 6.15am PST, and I was there at 3.45am. What I didn't realize is that the ticket counter didn't open til 4.30am, and customs not til *5am*, thank you. But once they got started, everyone moved along pretty quickly.

I did get pulled over for extra searching, but nothing serious: where was I going, could I open the bag, where do I work. Once that was done, the officer was quite friendly; he urged me to take time to go see the sights, since work was paying for this. I expected worse.

But man, I don't know when I'll have the time. Training starts tomorrow with a full day of Solaris 10, and it just keeps going from there. Plus, of course, there's the free beer and ice cream. The time, she flies, no?

I need to get a haircut. I haven't shaved my head in two weeks, so I've got a damned dirty commie hippie head of hair at the moment.

Wow...over somewhere midwestern now, and the patchwork of land is neat to look at. Not half as beautiful as a city at night from 3000 metres, though...man, that's God's own set of Xmas lights.

12.30pm CST: Later...In O'Hare at Chicago, taking advantage of the free electrical outlets for charging laptops. The wifi access is charged-for, though, same as in Vancouver. And me without OzymanDNS...

10.20pm EST: Now in my hotel room. No wireless from USENIX up here, but it does work in the lobby where there's simply an amazing amount of very dressed-up corporate types. I think it's some sort of Xmas party. The contrast between them and the t-shirts-and-jeans crowd (not to mention me typing away alone on my laptop) is stunning. (Incidentally, my grandmother was both shocked and appalled to learn that not only was I not purchasing a new suit for this conference, I would not be wearing a suit at all.)

My luggage, I found out after an hour of waiting, is currently wending its way here from Chicago; I imagine some sort of Die Hard 2-esque leap across the tarmac that failed, but only barely. Allegedly United expected it here at 7pm and will courier it over Real Soon Now. We'll see.

By the time I finally made it to the hotel and checked in, it was 6.30pm . It had been a long time since I'd had anything but Mountain Dew (SPECIAL CAFFEINATED US VERSION!) to eat, so I was just starving enough to go for the -- wait for it -- $13 (US!) cheeseburger in the lobby. That and two Guinesses pretty much blew my budget for the week; at this point, I'm looking into the carb count in a BSSID beacon frame. (Yes, I'm making that term up.) Worth it, though; my roommate and I exchanged war/horror stories with a Sony engineer/sysadmin from San Francisco over the beer. Good times.

I'm pretty sure I saw Aeleen Frisch in the lobby. I think I saw William LeFebvre, the program chair, at the airport picking up baggage from the SAME BAGGAGE CAROUSEL where my stuff was supposed to be. There's this thing called USENIX bingo, where they give you cards with organizers' photos in it and you're supposed to get them to sign it. I think I'm going to tackle LeFebvre and ask him where my underwear is, then get him to sign my card to affirm that he didn't steal it.

I have not yet seem Tom Limoncelli, and I wouldn't recognize Dan Kaminsky if he queried my DNS server via avian carrier, so my plans to see what they've done with my underwear are, as yet, hazy. If my underwear doesn't show up, I may have to go shopping. I think the nearest Wal-Mart is in Tennessee.

Sun Microsystems

Journal Journal: Stupid, uninformative errors

Spent half the day trying to figure out why a Sun Directory Server had suddenly lost its ability to replicate over SSL. The logs said:

[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - INFORMATION - NSMMReplicationPlugin - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - Replication over SSL FAILED as SSL is not enabled. Check that the attribute nsslapd-security in cn=config is on.
[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - ERROR<8318> - Repl. Transport - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - [S] Bind failed with response: SSL configuration error (808).
[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - ERROR<8221> - Incremental Protocol - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - Failed and requires administrator action [ldap.example.com:636]
[21/Nov/2006:00:01:00 -0800] - ERROR<8221> - Incremental Protocol - conn=-1 op=-1 msgId=-1 - Failed and requires administrator action [ldap.example.com:636]

Google turned up nada. In the end, it turned out that the last time the directory server had been started, the security token had not been provided. Restarted the server, typed in the token on standard input, and replication works again.

Yes, this is a job for expect -- but this approach has failed for coworkers in the past. I'll have to look into it.

Unix

Journal Journal: OpenBSD netboot problems - unknown error code 72 1

(Note: edited to actually be correct this time. :-)

While trying to get a Sparc machine to boot disklessly so I could install OpenBSD on it, I kept getting these errors:

Boot: bsd.rd
Automatic network cable selection succeeded : Using TP Ethernet Interface
Using BOOTPARAMS protocol: ip address: 192.168.23.25, hostname: roark
root addr=192.168.23.10 path=/home/aardvark/openbsd-sparc64/chroot
open /sbus@1f,0/ledma@e,8400010/le@e,8c00000/bsd.rd: Unknown error: code 72

tcpdump showed that the machine was trying to contact the NFS server (192.168.23.10) by udp on port 0; the server kept responding with an ICMP port unreachable error. Googling turned up one other person back in '99 (!) who had the same problem, but no fix.

What was weird was that this had worked during an earlier install -- only the running of MAKEDEV hadn't completed (don't ask), so I didn't have /dev/console when I booted up, which meant no nothing once it tried to mount the root directory.

I started looking at the traffic in greater detail, and saw that the packet to port 0 was, according to Ethereal^WWireshark, a nicely formed NFS call trying to get the filehandle for the kernel (/bsd). Well, what would make it send it there? After all, mountd was listening on the same port it'd been contacted on a moment ago...

Looking at the call to portmap on port 111, I saw that the client was asking for the port for nfsd, but was being told that there was no such thing -- that the port number was zero. What the...I checked rpcinfo -p and saw that, yep, there was no nfsd...and then realized my mistake: mountd only deals with mount requests; it's nfsd that actually reads/writes files, gives information about their size and modification times, and so on. I'd been starting the NFS stuff by hand since this was a one-off, and had totally forgotten to start nfsd. I did so, and suddenly all went well. PEBCAK.

Networking

Journal Journal: Bones of an Idol 2

Thursday: Go to The Other University to do some prep for the move coming up next week. Check in with their computer store (where you pretty much have to buy things) to see how the order on the console server is going. The guy behind the counter looks up the order, frowns, and tells me that it seems their supplier does not have one in any of their three Canadian warehouses. Okay, so how long will it take to get one in? He looks at me earnestly and says that, sometimes, they never come in. I ask at what point I can count on the supplier a) giving up and b) informing me of that fact. He frowns again, and suggests that I check back in a couple weeks (four weeks after I've placed the order) just to be safe.

Friday: Get email from contractor/university liason for new building to say that network and electrical connections will not be ready in time because the requests were received so very late. While The Other Guy was supposed to get them in long ago, I should've been on top of this.

Monday, a stat in Canada: Go to the old building to do a serverectomy on a soon-to-be-formerly shared rack. The Other Guy mentions that the new server room has water on the floor. I go over to look, and it's a rapidly evaporating puddle, irregular in shape and maybe two metres across at its widest. I can't figure out where it's coming from. Turns out there's some other stuff that should become formerly shared as well, so I spend time poring over Sun Enterprise 1 workstations (which I like) and old inkjet cartridges for printers that may no longer be around (which I don't like). Ask The Other Guy, who's been involved with the move a lot longer than I have, what electrical connections he's asked for him and for me (long story) in the new building. He says that he gave them the model number of the Sun rack he's got (which has built-in, and very nice, PDUs) and asked them to figure out what he needs.

Tuesday: Moving day. As expected, network and electrical are not present; we've got 2 x 15A 120V circuits. Also, the leak is back, and we can see that it's coming from a small leak in the concrete roof. I move my rack into another room; The Other Guy spreads a blanket over his rack. The liason promises us that the contractors are on the job to fix the roof. The network connections (two fiber, two Cat5) get terminated, so I call the local network folks to get that taken care of. The university wireless network is not present in the new building.

Wednesday: The contractors show up to start fixing the leak. The network connections have been set up. The contractors have put in a big tube of plastic sheeting, taped to the roof at one end and a 40-gallon recycling barrel at the other. The Other Guy decides things are good enough and starts setting up his rack; I elect to hold off another day.

Thursday: The contractors say the roof is fixed, so I move the rack in and start hooking things up. The new OpenBSD firewall comes up nicely -- thank you, pf developers -- as does the main Sun server. Next up is the SunRays in the lab, only they're not. I take my laptop in and try to verify connectivity. I can't. The Other Guys suggests that the VLANs on my new switch are the problem and suggests just simplifying things. I do and keep testing. Traffic from the laptop's RFC 1918 address just never makes it to the server. In a fit of desperation I try using an address in our routable subnet, and it works. This takes me until 8pm to figure out. I email various bosses explaining how far I've got, and the campus network folks to ask if they're filtering this subnet in some way. (This isn't completely out of the question; this place has a reputation for a pretty locked-down network.)

Friday: I buttonhole the guy at the campus network office and ask him about this. He considers this and realizes that while he's forgotten to unblock DHCP (told you it was pretty locked down), the other behaviour I'm seeing can be explained if I've somehow got my interfaces crossed. I'm doubtful but give it a try, which is a good thing because suddenly everything works. I don't understand it or what I did wrong, but assume that I was simply too tired the previous night and thank him profusely for taking the time to talk to me. I am now where I should have been twenty hours before. Mighty battles emerge with Sun's DHCP and Sunray servers. In the end, I have to delete the Sunray configuration, delete all DHCP configurations, and then add the Sunray configuration back. This works, which annoys me; why are there all these opaque configurations around? Not a single plain-text file in sight. I manage to get a printer working, then another. DHCP is modified so that laptops work as well. I call it a night and head home.

Operating Systems

Journal Journal: 8 o'clock, the lights were on at Shea

Woot! I managed to install OpenBSD 4.0 on my work laptop this afternoon while Arlo slept in my arms. Not only that, it automagically set up X and I figured out wireless + OpenVPN. Woot! Firefox is running, I've got Mozex and Adblock going...the only thing left is to figure out how to get IceWM to start up automagically.

Programming

Journal Journal: The Universe occasionally says "Fuck You"

If your machine has hard drives that are, in theory, removeable because they have a front catch, but in practice require you to open up the case to disconnect the SCSI and power cables, that's not a server.

If your machine's CD drive fails and it takes you fifteen minutes of searching to find the unlabelled holes on the bottom of the case that allow access to the screws that are attached to the bottom of the drive so that you can actually remove the drive, that's not a server.

For $399 US, thank you, for the Academic edition of MathMagic, I expect better goddamned installation instructions than this:

- Windows
- MathMagic Pro Edition Full installer with some old versions of fonts and
Plugin
(Please run this full installer first.)
[ a url ]

- MathMagic Pro Edition v3.5 (application only. The latest version.)
(Please use this v3.5 application, instead of v3.0 installer by the
installer, after moving it into /Program Files/MathMagic Pro/ folder)
[ another url ]

- new CS & CS2 plugin
(Please use this Plug-in, instead of the Installer installed one. Copy
it into InDesign's Plug-ins/Equations folder.)
[ whee! lookit alla urls! ]

- new fonts for PDF embedding
(If you want to embed MathMagic fonts in your PDF documents on Windows,
please download the new MathMagic TrueType font set, and replace the
preinstalled ones(remove the old MathMagic fonts from Windows Fonts
directory and copy these new fonts into Windows Fonts folder).
[ sale! sale on urls! ]

The email goes on to suggest that installation instructions can be found on their website (but neglect to mention that it only covers the Mac version), or "in User Guide documents that you can find after installation." What a crock.

Sun Microsystems

Journal Journal: I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

Thank you to our sponsors for the title.

Good news: I'm going to LISA! I convinced my employers to heavily subsidize my trip. I've booked a double room at the hotel; I'll be posting to the roomshare mailing list shortly, but feel free to comment or email if you wanna split the cost.

Bad news: I somehow borked X on my desktop at work yesterday. The symptoms are quite strange, and mostly involve not being able to click on a window and have focus move there. It's IceWM, and I haven't changed focus model, and the symptoms persisted over multiple restarts of KDM (ctrl-alt-backspace). I looked for open files, running processes and even removed .gconf* and .gnome* on principle; nothing. The only thing that was different was running, for the first time, the new(ish - 1.5.0.2) version of Firefox after d/l it from the Mozilla site. The machine is running SuSE 10, and for various reasons I can't update it right now. In the end, I got desparate enough to try a reboot, and of course that fixed it...which is NO FUCKING WAY to solve problems, dammit.

(Interesting how this pokes holes in my manly command-line-only stance; yes, I was able to get some work done by going to the console, but frankly I've become very very used to managing terminals and a browser with IceWM and it's hard to switch back. Damn.)

Weird news: A while back I came across a problem with a Solaris 10 machine: lpq just hung, and eventually timed out with an error (that I haven't written down, so I suck). Eventually figured out it was trying to contact the lpd service on the machine's main interface (handwave goes here about BSD-compatibility printing commands), which should've been run by inetd. Okay, but inetd is now taken care of by inetadm and svcs, not /etc/inetd.conf anymore. And while the command is called in.lpd, it's actually called svc:/application/print/rfc1179. Which is in maintenance mode, so start it up only it doesn't and I cannot figure out why: no log files I can see (the scattering of log files in a default Solaris install is really driving me nuts), no reason given, nothing. I ask another sysadmin who admits he's stumped by it but just for fun tries putting in an entry in /etc/inetd.conf and then running inetconv, the way you're not supposed to have to do except for weird legacy stuff that hasn't been moved to svcs yet. And damnitall, it works. Again, no idea why.

And that is it for now. I am tired beyond belief, having moved up my annual snifter of port from Xmas to go out with coworkers last night. I stopped drinking at 7pm and I'm still tired today. Pathetic. Arlo would be so disappointed in me.

Slashdot Top Deals

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

Working...