Little Green Bag

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.