lingqi's Journal: Feburary 21st, 2003

Feburary 21st, 2003 (10:40pm)

Well; I am not sure what's with this forgetting to write journal thing... Maybe I am getting - gasp - older.

For several days now my left front wheel have been making "crack crack" noise, but upon braking, it would go away. I thought possibly the CV joint got dirty and something is grinding. Yesterday I decided jokingly to myself, well, maybe the wheel's loose. Upon inspection, however, three of the five nuts really WERE loose! the wheel has been whobbling on the remaining two.

wee. good thing I checked. After tightening, everything is back to normal. Near death experience. ha!

Today the moving crowd in the office was more extreme. The entire floor looked like some kind of refugee camp with people packing up and settling down all at the same time. Actually another analogy might be a case of insanity music-chairs - with stuff. You carry your stuff to the other cubes, while somebody is waiting for your cube, and so on and so forth in a confusing chain of dependency - circle of life? I feel lucky that my destination was empty, otherwise the act of coordinate between some guy moving out of my perspective cube, myself moving, and somebody moving into my current cube, would be a nightmare.

I have made one small progress in Linux. Now the system has been updated (once) using internet time. First of all thanks Molo for the suggestions. It turns out that ntpdate wants to use port 123 for the actual updating but for debug / query it uses a non-privledged port (>1024). This means that while "ntpdate -q" works fine, when I actually want to update it craps out. Now that it's updated, I noticed that the ntpd is still sitting around doing not much, probably due to the same port-issue. However, I can't find where to put a line allowing ntpd to use a non-priv port (ntp.conf doesn't seem like it). Sigh... Yeah... not for the faint of heart - using linux.

Damn... why doesn't powerbooks come with UXGA-esq screens? That's probably the ONLY reason holding me back.

ntp..

[molo]

First of all thanks Molo for the suggestions. It turns out that ntpdate wants to use port 123 for the actual updating but for debug / query it uses a non-privledged port (>1024). This means that while "ntpdate -q" works fine, when I actually want to update it craps out. Now that it's updated, I noticed that the ntpd is still sitting around doing not much, probably due to the same port-issue.

Happy to help. I'm confused by something. Why do you want ntpdate and your ntpd to use a non-privelidged port? Both programs need to set the system time, which means they need to run as a privelidged user (root). Then using a privelidged port is not a problem.. unless there is a firewall or somesuch.

To see whats going on with your ntpd, check the system logs. (usually /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog)

Good luck!

-molo

Re:ntp..

[lingqi]

privledged *port* as in port number =1024

non-privledged = everything else.

the firewall in the company (which is wayyy out of control by me) blocks all the privledged port communitaitons to the outside, so any attemp to connect over port 123 (default for ntp) would fail - of course with the catch that ntpdate -q or ntpdate -d would default to the non-priv port.

As far as being root - I found out that redhat actually patched it so that ntpd doesn't run as root but a "privledged user" with specific right (in this case setting the system time). pretty neat stuff, I don't think it's "standard" linux, though.

Apple & UXGA

[Vengeru]

Damn... why doesn't powerbooks come with UXGA-esq screens? That's probably the ONLY reason holding me back. I know what you're talking about. I would really like to know why Apple aren't investing in better screens for their PowerBook line. My brother switched (A reverse switch!) not to long ago, from a TiBook to a Dell Latitude with a 1600x1200 (UXGA) screen. A high resolution screen is simply worth a lot if you do work in Photoshop and Dreamweaver for example. I'm using an identical machine myself and I couldn't be happier. Only problem is I never use my desktop machine nowadays, this laptop has everything I need.. it even plays my games well. / V