The Life of a Sysadmin

Some days are fun days. I got this error on a Debian workstation when starting X:

Xlib: Connection to ":0.0" refused by server Xblib: Protocol not
supported by server.  Xrdb: Can't open display ':0'

Turns out that an .xsession file, with one commented-out line, caused that. Remove the line (so now it's empty) and everything works.

Next we got the same user, who's had his home directory moved around on the machine. Machines mounting his home dir via amd (FreeBSD, Debian) work fine, but the SuSE machines running autofs fail miserably with "permission denied" and the ever-popular:

$ cd
-bash: cd: /home/foo: Unknown error 521

Which, if you look up /usr/include/linux/errno.h -- which, you know, is the logical thing to do -- you see this:

/* Defined for the NFSv3 protocol */
#define EBADHANDLE      521     /* Illegal NFS file handle */

Another weird thing with AutoFS: I was running cfengine on a machine, and it hung when querying which RPMs were installed. strace on the rpm command shows its trying to lock a file and failing; looking at /proc/number/fd shows that, yep, it's trying and failing to lock /var/lib/rpm/Packages, the Berkeley DB file that knows all and sees all. So lsof to see who's holding it open, and that hangs; strace shows it's hanging trying to access the home directory of a user whose machine is down right now for reinstall. Try to unmount that directory and it fails. So I bring up the machine with the user's home directory, which allows me to unmount his home directory on the SuSE machine, which allows cfengine to run rpm, which succeeds in locking the Berkely DB file. Strange; possibly similar to this problem.

On top of everything else, someone asked me if I could be a "network prime". I think they mean "person we can talk to with authority to make network changes", or possibly "network contact". Not entirely sure.

But on the other hand: figured out how to run wpkg, package manager for Windows of the elder gods, as a service using Cygwin's cygrunsrv. The instructions are on the wiki for your viewing enjoyment.

Let's not worry now
Let's not worry now
Cos we're right
And they're wrong
And it's over.

Sometimes it's just all about Swell.

In preparation for my new job, I've installed OpenSolaris on Pouxie, my wife's old desktop machine (a nice 2GHz Athlon). I've used Belenix, a live CD that includes a driver for Pouxie's onboard NForce ethernet interface.

So far I'm having a lot of fun. It took me three hours (spread over four days...damn this commute) to get a static IP address assigned to the thing, and then to get DNS working. But after a reinstall (a newer version of Belenix had come out that included the Sun packaging tools, which should let me use Blastwave to grab Emacs...a good first project, I think), I had it up and running in just a few minutes. Progress!

For those playing the home game, here's what I had to do:

1. modinfo | grep nfo: yep, the module has been loaded.
2. ifconfig -a | grep nfo0: Not there.
3. dladm show-link: But it is here.
4. echo "192.168.23.40 pouxie-2" >> /etc/inet/hosts
5. echo "pouxie-2" > /etc/hostname.nfo0 ; echo "netmask 255.255.255.0" >> /etc/hostname.nfo0
6. echo "192.168.23.254" > /etc/defaultrouter
7. reboot -- -r: to get Solaris to find the new interface (?)
8. ifconfig -a: Now it shows up configured.
9. svcadm --disable svc:/network/inetmenu: Otherwise, it interferes with the change to nsswitch.conf I'm going to do up ahead.
10. svcadm --enable svc:/network/dns/client: I long to know what this actually turns on.
11. cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.conf
12. echo "nameserver 192.168.23.254" >> /etc/resolv.conf
13. ping www.saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com: It's alive!

Happy birthday, OpenSolaris!

So Pouxie, my new OpenSolaris box, started displaying the same let's-shut-down-randomly-'cos-it's-Friday problems it previously did -- guess it's not the case after all. No problem, 'cos I happen to have a spare mobo and CPU that I've been itching to try out.

As it happens, it's got an onboard Intel ethernet interface which is detected just fine (iprb0, thank you) by Belenix/OpenSolaris, but fails to be brought up properly during boot. The problem is that while the interface is assigned an IPv4 address, it's not actually up, which means that adding the route fails, and /lib/svc/method/net-physical (which surprised me by being a simple shell script) declares failure. (I think it's just the route command that fails, but I should check this out.)

No idea why this happens on iprb0 and not nfo0, but what the hell. Looking around the script shows that it does do ifconfig plumb up on IPv6 interfaces -- but when I tried touching /etc/hostname6.iprb0 and running the script again (yeah, I know, probably a horrible thing that makes Bill Joy cry) it created a duplicate iprb0 interface with only an IPv6 interface. It was up, the IPv4 version was still down, and the IPv4 route command failed.

In the end I just edited the script to make it run ifconfig plumb up like it does with IPv6, and it seemed to do the trick just fine. I'm currently trying to see if there's a similar bug already filed on OpenSolaris.org; looks like I have a lot of slogging.

In other news, I thought I'd be posting this using BlogFS, but I'm running into library problems. First, I had to change import xmlrpc to importxmlrpclib. No biggie, even I can do that, but now I'm getting this when I try to create the directory that would mount the blog:

#  mkdir foo:bar@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/xmlrpc.php
mkdir: cannot create directory `./foo:bar@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/xmlrpc.php': No such file or directory

Not sure what's going on.

Up until today, I would've told you that the stupidest thing I'd read on the Internet was a white paper titled "Is PowerPoint An E-Learning Solution?" But OMG ponies, the bar has been raised.

Precisely why a made-up word making it to Google should be considered news is never really explored. Wired's whole-hearted gushing about someone who "has registered freedbacking domains and plans to aggregate freedbacking comments on a new website next week" is also a nice touch -- way to accelerate the IPO! Finally, you've got the thoughtfully-placed-last obligatory OTOH about how "consumer ignorance and laziness could also keep the value of the suggestions low."

<headdesk /> <headdesk /> <headdesk />

Birth is being induced. Baby's well, wife is well. Wish us luck.

When last Clara visited the doctor (Wed), Dr said that a routine checkup on the babby would be in order at some point this weekend -- Monday, maybe? Turned out to be today, around 2pm. During the ultrasound it further turned out that Babby/Clara had low levels of amniotic fluid. This means that they wanted to induce Real Soon Nowtm. This was begun about 6pm, about ten minutes before I made it to BC Womenâ's. (Stupid bus drivers that don't stop at King Edward when theyâ're asked -- but I digress.)

She's being kept for observation, which means taping big things to her belly and watching the strip of paper slowly come out of the machine that goes ping! when it runs out of paper. I've come back to the house to get things like the hospital bag and cheese, and to feed the catt. (Let this be a lesson to someone: when going to the hospital after your due date, always bring the bag. If they say you don't need it, hit them.)

Clara is doing well. The baby is doing well. No telling how long it could take before active labour starts; the nurses said they've seen it as quick as three hours, or as long as 24. We're hoping for a Canada Day babby, especially after hearing the story about the friend of the nurse who got free stuff for LIFE because the kid was born on July 1st. (Seriously. Government owes the kid a damned helicopter now.)

The next post will probably be made once we're back from the hospital; you should expect something like "Holy CRAP this thing's small!"

That is all.