So each night I do battle with the Forces of Evil. I'm pretty sure that tonight is the night. Tonight, I'll spit in Evil's eye and hoof it a sweet one in the 'nads.

For the past three days, I've been fighting with the leafnode news server. Since I live in a rural area, I've got a slow, crappy, painful 28.8K modem connection to the net. That's the best I can get where I live. Matter of fact, I've never connected faster than 26.4K. Ugh. Anyway, I've been playing around with various things intended to "enhance the user experience", such as bandwidth limiting for downloads, caching dns server, squid proxy, and so on. I plan on playing with multilink PPP and a couple of modems soon. Anyway, lately I've gotten it into my head that I want to be able to conveniently read news at home, and maybe get a few binaries from the alt groups. I looked around and found that leafnode is perfect for my configuration (2 users behind a linux firewall and a slow modem). So I downloaded, configured, built and installed. I set up a cron job to do a nightly fetchnews run, and thought I had it licked.

I was wrong.

Each of the past three nightly crons has failed for various reasons (file permissions, on-demand ppp link being down at the time, "dead" fetchnews processes hanging around..) A little searching in the archives of the leafnode mailing list revealed that other people have had the same problem and, more importantly, have written a little perl-scripted front-end for fetchnews that makes it more robust in handling "dead" fetchnews processes. Woo-hoo! So, tonight I'm going to ensure the script is in place and functioning. Then, when the after-midnight cron fires, I will be living in a world of conveniently-delivered Usenet goodness.

It's amazing what you can do with linux on an old AMD K90/32MB box. This old box has been running almost constantly for years, and aside from a noisy CPU fan, it gives us no trouble at all.

The other battle against the Forces Of Evil has been the Saga of the Racoons and the Garbage. As I mentioned, I live in a rural area, so there's lots of critters living in the same area. We've suddenly had lots of problems with racoons digging around in our garbage cans. So, each night when I get home from work I've built increasingly stout/complex mechanisms for keeping the little darlings from dragging garbage all over my garage and yard. Tonight is the night. I've got it, for sure...

Current Song: DJ Keoki - Speed Racer (Porn Mix)

Kablooie!!

I just wanted to chip in on the issue of the "great blackout". As another poster said, the blackout is silly, without a real goal, and can only hurt slashdot.

I, for one, intend to boycott the blackout.

Kablooie!!