I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

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.