The Life of a Sysadmin

1. Trying to NFS mount something (Solaris client and server) and getting error 7 (RPC: Authentication error)? Check /etc/nsswitch.conf on the server and make sure that things like auth_attr, netgroups and so on are not set to use (say) ldap [NOTFOUND=return]. Doubly so if you've just run ldapclient -v init the night before and forgot that, surprise! it changes nsswitch.conf.

2. Starting up OpenOffice on Solaris 9/Gnome only to see gibberish in the title bar rather than the file name? Log out, and in the whatever-DM login screen go to Language and select C - POSIX. Log back in. Works like a charm!

These Top Tips brought to you by the number Pi and the beverage Beer.

When my wife went to pick up the co-op car we'd booked for Sunday, she found that the mirror hanging off the door by the control cables. Fortunately, a little camo duct tape -- a Christmas gift from my parents -- took care of it (at least until the co-op can get it fixed):

And then there's this:

Thanks to John and Arwen for Arlo's shirt, and to Theo et al. for mine.

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.