eno2001's Journal: IM: I'm a Mad Scientist

A friend of mine put some music up on his webserver that he wanted me to hear. After downloading it and looking at the way I did it, I realized, maybe I've lost my mind? Judge for yourself:

(13:58:49) eno2001/Gaim: hehehe... OK. Want to hear something crazy?
(13:59:00) Fuji: OK
(13:59:06) eno2001/Gaim: This is how I'm listening to that track.
(13:59:23) eno2001/Gaim: I am running Gentoo 2006.1 on my workstation.
(13:59:42) Fuji: OK
(13:59:45) eno2001/Gaim: On that workstation I'm running QEMU to run a Gentoo 2006.1 VM so I can proxy all web traffic.
(14:00:00) eno2001/Gaim: That VM is using my USB key drive as my /home filesystem so I can take it anywhere I go with me. (ie. Nothing left at work ;P)
(14:00:15) eno2001/Gaim: That VM is also using a Squid proxy for all web traffic.
(14:00:22) eno2001/Gaim: The squid proxy is at home.
(14:00:28) eno2001/Gaim: On another Xen VM.
(14:00:56) Fuji: sometimes I think you just deliberately make things more complex than need be
(14:00:58) Fuji: :)
(14:00:59) eno2001/Gaim: I'm accessing the squid proxy from within my QEMU VM via the OpenVPN connection that I have on my actual workstation here (non VM).
(14:01:18) eno2001/Gaim: The OpenVPN server is also at home, but it's running in a QEMU VM.
(14:01:35) eno2001/Gaim: It's the dead soul of my original Redhat Linux 7 web server/vpn server, etc... I still need to move the remaining services from the old soul to the new Xen VM box.
(14:01:54) eno2001/Gaim: All of that VPN traffic pierces my Linux firewall at home.
(14:02:08) eno2001/Gaim: Which is running RedHat 6 with lots of manual updates.
(14:02:33) eno2001/Gaim: However... the GUI on my local QEMU VM is actually locked up at the moment. Something went wrong with it.
(14:02:43) eno2001/Gaim: I'm in the middle of a huge emerge though so I can't just kill it or reboot the VM.
(14:02:55) eno2001/Gaim: So... in order to hear your song...
(14:03:04) eno2001/Gaim: I sshed into the QEMU VM from my workstation.
(14:03:28) eno2001/Gaim: I exported the DISPLAY variable so the Firefox browser would use my actual workstation's display instead of the VM's display.
(14:03:50) eno2001/Gaim: When the download finished, it asked if it should launch the Totem media player to which I said yes.
(14:04:13) eno2001/Gaim: That also displayed on my real workstation's X server display and not on the VM X server.
(14:04:33) eno2001/Gaim: But.. the sound was handled by the VM and passed to the workstation via OSS support.
(14:04:49) eno2001/Gaim: Think of all the networking going on just to get and play that song! ;P
(14:05:12) eno2001/Gaim: That was pretty good BTW. I just finished listening.
(14:05:20) Fuji: heh heh
(14:05:50) eno2001/Gaim: I have truly become a "mad scientist".
(14:06:51) Fuji: heh heh
(14:06:56) eno2001/Gaim: BTW... something new I noticed about Gnome when you're exporting a remote app to a local display (ie. "publishing an application"). The title bar for my Firefox says, "eMusic - Mozilla Firefox (on Darkcity)". Darkcity is the name of my QEMU VM here.
(14:07:10) eno2001/Gaim: Rather nice as it lets you know what system the application is really running on.
(14:07:16) Fuji: interesting
(14:07:44) eno2001/Gaim: Man... explaining the way I have things running here points out to my just how Byzantine my systems can be. ;P

Obligatory

[Captain Splendid]

"Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill."

Re:

[eno2001]

I've skated uphill quite a few times in my life. It's insanely exhilarating. I plan to write a HOWTO someday.

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

Now I KNOW something's wrong with you, nobody likes to write documentation ;)

Re:

[WilliamSChips]

Nobody could like reading those. [irregularwebcomic.net]