01 Nov 2007
Dude, my laptop screen just turned blue. I'd booted into OpenBSD (4.2) and was trying to figure out how to turn off the audible bell. I'd gone from X to a virtual console to see if the problem happened there (it did), then tried ctrl-alt-f5 to get back to X.
My laptop screen turned from black with white text to grey with grey text to light blue with dark blue text, over the course of a minute or so. I thought I'd suddenly borked the LCD screen, but when I rebooted to Debian it was all fine. Just tried switching to a console, then back to X (alsoin Debian), and that's fine too. Bizarre.
Just checked the logs in OpenBSD and found a series of entries like this:
Nov 1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 0 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 1 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 2 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 3 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:17 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 4 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 5 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 6 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 7 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 8 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:24 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 9 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 10 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 11 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 12 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 13 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:31 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 14 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 15 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 16 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 17 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 18 is bound
Nov 1 16:47:38 laptop /bsd: agp_release_helper: mem 19 is bound
Very weird. On the bus, so Googling that'll have to wait. Although I do have the code on that partition…here we go: says it's the AGPIOC_RELEASE ioctl for agp. Aha! Maybe I'll explain money laundering while I'm at it.
And btw, here's a memo for the world: if you're on the toilet, don't take a phone call. It's really not that important.
Update, October 15 2008: Still happening with OpenBSD 4.3. And for the record, this is a Dell C300 laptop.
Tags:
hardware
bsd
dell
26 Oct 2007
Turns out you can get the built-in Broadcom wireless card in my
laptop (Dell C400) to work, but it did take me a bit of effort.
First off, I'd been looking at the wrong web page for the BCM43XX
project — the right one, as Prakash pointed out, is much
more up-to-date.
Second, again at Prakash's suggestion (thanks for that!), I downloaded
the drivers for the Dell 1370. Running the .exe in Wine extracted the
.sys file successfully. However, when I pointed fwcutter at them I got
this message:
Sorry, the input file is either wrong or not supported by b43-fwcutter.
This file has an unknown MD5sum 8d49f11238815a320880fee9f98b2c92.
So that .sys file was one not supported…at least, not for a while
now. That commit message was one of the few I could find that
mentioned this number. So I checked out revision 396 from the
Subversion repo, compiled it and pointed at the sys file…success!
Extraction!
Except that it still didn't work:
bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
Turns out it had extracted all the files to /lib/firmware/bcm430x_*,
rather than /lib/firmware/bcm43xx_*. Quick little shell-fu:
for i in bcm430x_* ; do j=$(echo $i | sed -e's/bcm430x/bcm43xx/') ; sudo ln -s $i $j ; done
and it worked when next I inserted the module…working right now, in
fact, despite lots of error messages like:
bcm43xx: WARNING: Writing invalid LOpair (low: 0, high: -115, index:
120)
[<d0ba6ebb>] bcm43xx_phy_lo_adjust+0x1e6/0x223 [bcm43xx]
[<d0ba7d04>] bcm43xx_phy_lo_g_measure+0x915/0xaeb [bcm43xx]
[<c01eb6db>] bit_cursor+0x479/0x48e
[<c02a4416>] __sched_text_start+0x686/0x73b
[<d0b9dde4>] bcm43xx_periodic_work_handler+0x15c/0x407 [bcm43xx]
[<d0b9dc88>] bcm43xx_periodic_work_handler+0x0/0x407 [bcm43xx]
[<c0130260>] run_workqueue+0x7d/0x109
[<c0133308>] prepare_to_wait+0x12/0x49
[<c0130a5d>] worker_thread+0x0/0xc7
[<c0130b17>] worker_thread+0xba/0xc7
[<c01331f5>] autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x35
[<c013312e>] kthread+0x38/0x5e
[<c01330f6>] kthread+0x0/0x5e
[<c01049c3>] kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10
in the kernel log.
No idea why I had to go through so much rigamarole, but hopefully
this will save time for someone else. Oh, and for the record: this is
with Debian Etch, 2.6.22 kernel from backports.org.
Tags:
hardware
dell
20 Oct 2007
I ordered the 4.2 CD set of OpenBSD at work, in another optimistic
step toward reorganizing the firewall there. In order to (ahem)
road-test it, I installed it on my new laptop (which, you'll
recall, is running Debian Stable) in a 5GB partition I'd left for
just this purpose.
Onboard wireless, like with Debian, did not work, and I didn't expect
it to; fuck you too, Broadcom. But my dad offered to send out a couple
of wireless cards he couldn't use, and I figured one of 'em would have
to work.
One was a Broadcom (op cit.), so that was out. The other, a DWL-650
(which appears to have umpty different versions over the years with
not one change in model number) looked promising: a Realtek chipset,
so should be good, right?
Well, it worked on OpenBSD -- but not in Linux. There's no driver in
the tree for it, and the outside project to make drivers for it
had its last official release in 2005. What's more, the CVS
version, for some reason, removes all of its source files when I
compile it, then complains that there are no files left to compile. To
be fair, I think this is because of a makefile included from
/lib/modules/2.6.22-2-686/build rather than the code itself.
Update: Just read Tourrilhes' page on the RealTek driver, and
learned something: there's a fork/resurrection of the project I'd
looked at, and it appears to be relatively current. I'll have to take
a look. SooperUpdate: the new project fixes the
let's-delete-all-the-files problem. Score!
What OpenBSD does not do on this laptop is suspend -- or more
accurately, come back from suspension. This works reasonably well
under Debian, which means that I still have one rose to give away to
The Next Laptop OS for Saint Aardvark.
Tags:
bsd
hardware
20 Oct 2007
My lack of experience with LDAP in general, and Sun's
(iPlanet|Directory Server( Enterprise Edition)?) in particular, has
proven to be a bit of a handicap of late.
Case in point: when I upgraded $big_machine to Solaris 10 at the
end of August, I also upgraded its LDAP server from iPlanet 5.1 to
DSEE 6 (same software, different name). At the time I had two
problems: I was unable to get replication to $big_server (we have a
multi-master configuration; not supposed to work with 5.1, but it
does/did for us) working over SSL, and replication from
$big_server to other machines did not work. There were a lot of
things going wrong at that point, so I set up replication in the clear
from $little_machine, another LDAP server on the LAN, and left it
'til I had more time. It wasn't ideal, but it would do.
The last two Saturdays I've been trying to figure out why replication
wasn't working. I concentrated on getting replication to it working
over SSL. This was tough, because the logs didn't tell me much:
Server failed to flush BER data back to client
I swear, this turned up more Googlejuice today than it did a few weeks
ago, because this time it turned up the ever-excellent Brandon
Hutchinson again. This time he had a truly great set of
instructions on installing DSEE6. That lead me to this blog
entry, very helpful, giving information about the different sorts
of databases you can stick your SSL certs into. (Must learn more
about SSL/OpenSSL…)
However, in the end it turned out to be a simple and moderately
embarassing mistake: it's not enough, with DS6, to say dsadm
add-cert and be done with it; you actually have to specify the
certificate to use. As Brandon points out, you have to edit =dse.ldif=
in order to do so (though I had to stop the server, edit the file and
start it up again, rather than just edit and restart, in order to get
it to work).
The other thing — replication from $big_server elsewhere — is still
not working. I suspect this is my fault; in an attempt to get things
working, I decided that the thing to try would be initializing
$big_server from $little_server, then the other way around. This did
not change things, and now $little_server is unable to push its
changes elsewhere. I've since been told this is a mistake on my part;
arghh.
Unfortunately, there were other things I screwed up in the original
install of DS6 on $big_server — embarassing and rather pointless to
record for Google right now — and I strongly suspect that I'm going to
have to reinstall or reinitialize $big_server just to get things into
a reasonably coherent state. Fortunately, there aren't that many
changes that ever happen on it, so there shouldn't be many to lose or
redo if it's wiped.
And thus my Saturday.
Tags:
solaris
ldap
upgrades
18 Oct 2007
title: Snort
date: Thu Oct 18 21:10:45 PDT 2007
This just made me laugh and laugh and laugh.
Tags:
16 Oct 2007
Tonight, my 15.5-month-old son pointed at a hat and said "Hat!"
I said, "Yes, you're right. And what's that on the hat?"
"Guk?"
"It's a penguin. And what does a penguin say?"
"Inix."
It's a proud day.
Tags:
geekdad
11 Oct 2007
I came across Steve's blog compiler (wonderful phrase; he tells me it
comes from wiki compiler) Chronicle t'other day, and I'm
intrigued. It's a great deal more polished than what I've got; his
Makefile alone inspires envy in me. It's easy to tell that he's an
actual programmer…
Chronicle does Markdown or Textile, not AsciiDoc, but it should be
simple enough to grab the guts of this and make it do the
job. And in any case my love of AsciiDoc is at least half due to its
nice CSS, which I could steal.
The one thing that might be nice is that, looking in the code,
Chronicle seems to recompile/regenerate all the HTML, whether or not
anything has changed; I'm using make for regenerating the pages here,
so as to avoid that. Of course, I could be wrong — I've only given
Chronicle a once-over — and in any case my crappy lack of server-side
includes makes for many rebuilds when (say) I add another link to the
sidebar.
Tags:
meta
06 Oct 2007
The laptop I bought off eBay arrived at work on Wednesday...which is my
day at home with Arlo. Thursday I was off sick with flu. Yesterday I
was back at work and slashing open the box it came in, eager to see
what I'd got.
Well, I already knew: it's a Dell C400. 12" screen, 1.2GHz P3 (but
running at 800MHz with SpeedStep and all), 256MB RAM and a 30GB
drive. Not a whole lot of memory, and a bigger hard drive would
always be nice, but I can always upgrade. There's no CD drive in this
thing, and I hadn't plumped for the docking station, so I set up PXE
booting to install Debian. It was a trifle slow, but it worked!
(Especially the second time, after I'd accidentally overwritten Debian
trying to install OpenBSD on another partition. :-)
I'm surprised at how much Just Works in this thing: X.org (no
configuration needed, just start up XDM...mann, that's nice),
suspend-to-disk, ethernet (well, it's a 3c905; what do you
expect?). Even the battery, which I'd written off in advance, appears
to hold a decent charge -- about four hours so far. The one thing
that's dicy is the onboard wireless, a Dell 1370 from everybody's
favourite company. But again, I'd written that off in advance.
Next up: I've ordered the OpenBSD 4.2 CD set, so I'll be
installing that once it arrives. And Noah has shown the way to
longer battery life; I'm getting my 2.6.22 kernel now from
Backports. (Oh, the shame of not compiling my own kernel...)
On another note, I think someone had one too many Dilbert moments:
$ dig newcastle.edu.au mx
; <<>> DiG 8.3 <<>> newcastle.edu.au mx
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->> HEADER <<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 2
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4
;; QUERY SECTION:
;; newcastle.edu.au, type = MX, class = IN
;; ANSWER SECTION:
newcastle.edu.au. 11h59m12s IN MX 10 proactive.newcastle.edu.au.
newcastle.edu.au. 11h59m12s IN MX 10 synergy.newcastle.edu.au.
Perhaps they got the names from /dev/bollocks.
Tags:
bsd
hardware
dell
02 Oct 2007
title: My quest for the perfect window manager continues...
date: Tue Oct 2 09:13:02 PDT 2007
The latest entry: Awesome, a rewrite of dwm that just hit the OpenBSD ports tree. May have to give it a try…
Tags:
29 Sep 2007
I've had a bunch of ideas lately. I'm inflicting them on you.
The presentation went well...I didn't get too nervous, or run too
long, or start screaming at people (damn Induced Tourette's Syndrome)
or anything. There were maybe 30 or so people there, and a bunch of
them had questions at the end too. Nice! I was embiggened enough by
the whole experience that, when the local LUG announced that they
were having a newbie's night and asked for presenters to explain
stuff, I volunteered. It's coming up in a few weeks; we'll see what
happens.
And then I thought some more. A few days before I'd been listening to
the almost-latest episode of LugRadio (nice new design!),
where they were talking about GUADEC and PyCon UK. PyCon was
especially interesting to hear about; the organizers had thought
"Wouldn't it be cool to have a Python conference here in the UK?", so
they made one.
So I thought, "It's a shame I'm not going to be able to go to
LISA this year. Why don't we have our own conference here in
Vancouver?" The more I thought about it, the better the idea
seemed. We could have it at UBC in the summer, where I'm pretty sure
there are cheap venues to be had. Start out modest — say, a day long
the first time around. We could have, say, a training track and a
papers track. I'm going to talk about this to some folks and see what
they think.
Memo to myself: still on my list of stuff to do is to join
pool.ntp.org. Do it, monkey boy!
Another idea I had: a while back I exchanged secondary DNS service,
c/o ns2exchange.com. It's working pretty well so far, but I'm not
monitoring it so it's hard for me to be sure that I can get rid of the
other DNS servers I've got. (Everydns.net is fine, but they
don't do TXT or IPv6 records.) I'm in the process of setting up
Nagios to watch my own server, but of course that doesn't tell me what
things look like from the outside.
So it hit me: what about Nagios exchange? I'll watch your services if
you watch mine. You wouldn't want your business depending on me, of
course, but this'd be fine for the slightly anal sysadmin looking to
monitor his home machines. :-) The comment link's at the end of the
article; let me know if you're interested, or if you think it's a
good/bad/weird idea.
The presentation also made me think about how this job has been, in
many ways, a lot like the last job: implementing a lot of Things That
Really Should Be Done (I hate to say "Best Practices) in a small
shop. Time is tight and there's a lot to do, so I've been slowly
making my way through the list:
- Improving backups (Bacula, Amanda)
- Automated install (FAI, Jumpstart)
- Monitoring services (Nagios)
- Monitoring performance (MRTG, Cacti)
- Ticket system (RT)
- Automating management (Cfengine)
Some of these things have been held up by my trying to remember what I
did the last time. And then there's just getting up to speed on
bootstrapping a Cfengine installation (say).
So what if all these things were available in one easy package? Not an
appliance, since we're sysadmins — but integrated nicely into one
machine, easily broken up if needed, and ready to go? Furthermore,
what if that tool was a Linux distro, with all its attendant tools and
security? What if that tool was easily regenerated, and itself served
as a nicely annotated set of files to get the newbie up and running?
Between FAI (because if it's not Debian, you're working too hard) and
cfengine, it should be easy to make a machine look like this. Have it
work on a live ISO, with installation afterward with saved
customizations from when you were playing around with it.
Have it be a godsend for the newbie, a timesaver for the experienced,
and a lifeline for those struggling in rapidly expanding shops. Make
this the distro I'd want to take to the next job like this.
I'm tentatively calling this Project U-13. We'll see how it
goes.
Oh, and over here we've got Project U-14. So, you know, I've got
lots of spare time.
Tags:
dns
monitoring
geekdad
ntp
projectu13
cfengine
conferenceorganization
24 Sep 2007
For my own future reference, Otter Escaping North recently posted
two excellent comments about being a geek parent in a recent
Slashdot discussion about PC parental controls. The whole article
is worth reading (though I always read at +3), but Otter's really
resonated with me.
And from the world of obnoxious EULAs comes this gem from Live365's
software player for Windows:
"You may not alter, merge, modify, adapt or translate the SOFTWARE
PRODUCT, or decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise
reduce the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to a human-perceivable form."
So hexdump -C is out, then? Or looking at it with less? Sigh…
Tags:
geekdad
23 Sep 2007
Just updated my resume for the first time since starting my
current job. It's nice to look back at what you've done and
realize that, hey, there's been a lot.
In other news, I finally gave in to lust the other day and bought a
Dell C400 on eBay. Nothing too special — 1.2GHz, 256MB, 30GB hard
drive — but I was mainly after the 12" screen, so that I'd be able to
(say) debug raw ethernet frames on my daily commute. About $280 when
all was said and done; the strong Canuckistan peso was part of the
incentive to buy now. Should be at the office in a week or so, and I
can't wait.
It amazed me to see how many off-lease laptops were available, and
just how cheap you could pick them up. A whilte back my boss got
a D420; with extra memory and a few other things, it came in at about
$1700 or so Canadian. But if you look around, there are plenty of
D400s and D410s around for less than $500 — even less than $400 if you
look hard. Add another $100 (say) for a working battery, and you're in
pretty good shape.
Virtualbox has made it to Debian testing — hurrah! Only it
won't run (Open)?Solaris. Dang.
On Tuesday, I'm giving a short presentation on my work's subnet at
SNAG, the UBC System and Network Administrator's Group. I found
Bruce in OpenBSD's ports tree on my laptop; the documentation is
(ahem) thin, but it works. Wish me luck.
And there's Arlo up. Time to go get him.
Tags:
hardware
bsd
dell
14 Sep 2007
I was able to get Quickbooks 2007 working with a non-admin account today…woot! Here's what I did:
- Create a user (let's call it "quickbooks") and put the user in the admin group. Set a password.
- Since our QuickBooks files are on a shared drive, I logged in as that user and mapped the share to a drive (let's say the Z: drive).
- Still as the quickbooks user, open up Windows Explorer. Select Tools -> Folder Options -> View and select "Launch folder windows in separate process". Log out.
- Log in as the ordinary user who needs to use Quickbooks and have them runas, using the quickbooks account: right-click on the Quickbooks icon, select Run As, then select the quickbooks account. Put in the password you set up.
- You may need to browse to the file rather than opening it up from quickbook's list of recently-opened files.
- I've also mapped the quickbooks drive in the ordinary user's account, and took care to map the drive to the same letter as in the Quickbooks account. I'm not sure if this is strictly necessary.
This isn't ideal — the explorer process in QB is still running privileged — but at least that's the only IE process running as admin.
And Bacula: tripped over a small thing. I'm running the btape utility to make sure our tape drive works with it. I ran bfill, rather than fill, then wondered why I got errors at the end. Turns out to be an old command that probably shouldn't be around anymore.
Now to run fill…another couple hours to go.
Tags:
windows
backups
10 Sep 2007
...it's another. Busted CPU on a Sun 440 at the university across town
meant I spent a bigger part of my day on the bus than usual. Remove
the CPU card/assembly/whatever (god, they're mother huge) and we're
back in business.
Incidentally, it amazes me that you can turn up fully spec'd V440s on
Ebay for, like, $8000 US. 4 x 1GHz CPUs, 16 GB of RAM, 4 x 72GB
drives...what's not to like?
Tags:
hardware
08 Sep 2007
Just when I was about to sign off for the day, suddenly the mail
server's down. No response to pings, no response on the console server
even. It's an old E220R, and while it's underpowered for all we're
asking from it, I haven't had problems with it before. (Well, except
for the CDROM drive not powering up. But I can live with that.)
So drive into work with the wife and kid, on the off chance that it'll
all be fine quickly. No such luck. It hadn't walked away, the cables
were all still in place, and I had to power cycle it to get it to come
back up. A lot of fscking later, and I'm waiting for it to finish
booting. I can't remember what it was like the last time I rebooted
it, but this time it seems rather ridiculous (20 minutes). More stuff
to add to the documentation once I'm done…
And once more: sysadmin documentation MUST NOT depend on external
services. (The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL",
"SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC
2119.)
Time for pizza.
Tags:
hardware
07 Sep 2007
One of the problems I've been working on since the upgrade to Solaris
10 has been the slowness of the SunRay terminals. There are a few
different problems here, but one of 'em is that after typing in your
password and hitting Enter, it takes about a minute to get the JDS
"Loading your desktop…" icons up.
I scratched my head over this one for a long time 'til I saw this:
ptree 10533
906 /usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -daemon -udpPort 0
10445 /usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -daemon -udpPort 0
```
10533 /bin/ksh /usr/dt/config/Xstartup
10551 /bin/ksh -p /opt/SUNWut/lib/utdmsession -c 4
10585 /bin/ksh -p /etc/opt/SUNWut/basedir/lib/utscrevent -c 4 -z utdmsession
10587 ksh -c echo 'CREATE_SESSION 4 # utdmsession' >/dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/7013
```
which just sat there and sat there for, oh, about a minute. So I run
netcat on port 7013, log out and log in again, and boom! quick as
anything.
/etc/services says:
utscreventd 7013/tcp # SUNWut SRCOM event deamon
which we're not running; something to do with smart cards. So why does
it hang so long? Because for some reason, the host isn't sending back
an RST packet (I presume; can't listen to find out) to kill the
connection, like it does on $other_server.
So now I'm trying to figure out why that is. It's not the firewall;
they're identical. I've tried looking at ndd /dev/tcp \? but I don't
see anything obvious there. My google-fu doesn't appear to be up to
the task either. I may have to cheat and go visit a fellow sysadmin to
find out.
Tags:
solaris
bug
networking
05 Sep 2007
And what do I see on Ben's blog but the new version of Solaris out — 8/07, not two weeks after this fiasco. Craptastic!
Tags:
solaris
upgrades
05 Sep 2007
Came across a mention of BSDstats.org on the Dragonfly BSD Digest, and I've set it up on my home machine. There are a ton of FreeBSD machines, and only 64 OpenBSD clients reported…time to change that!
I'm reading the documentation for Bacula right now, and it's amazing. Clearly written, thorough and extensive — almost 800 pages long. I'm very impressed.
Tags:
bsd
backups
03 Sep 2007
Some fun Emacs stuff:
- A nice tutorial on creating your own language mode. One of these days I'll get around to setting up something that indents SQL the way I want it.
- Multi-tty Emacs. From the description: "Emacs is notoriously slow at startup, so most people use another editor or emacsclient for quick editing jobs from the console. Unfortunately, emacsclient was very awkward to use, because it did not support opening a new Emacs frame on the current virtual console. Now, with multi-tty support, it can do that. (Emacsclient starts up faster than vi!)" Must get me some of that. (Hey, I wonder if there's a way to forward the emacs client/server thing over SSH…emacsclient at the remote end, emacs here. Yeah, you could do it with Tramp or some such, but this'd be neat. Hm…)
I had a meeting with my boss at work last week (before a nice four-day
weekend…the split schedule I've got means that sort of thing happens
very rarely. But I digress) to set my priorities now that the upgrade
has more or less been finished (lingering issues aside; see ahead).
One of the big things is getting Zimbra set up. This will be nice; we
do not have a calendar for the office right now, and this is is
getting to be a pain. My boss is open to the idea of something that's
not Outlook/Exchange, and that's good.
The other thing is getting a bunch more Windows machines in. This is a
small shop, so "a bunch" means another 15 or 20 -- which'll double the
number we have. I'm not entirely happy about that, but because this is
a longer-term project I've been given time to do this right. And to
me, "right" means "using open-source tools whenever possible to manage
Windows". Thus, I'll be getting the time to set up Unattended and
wpkg, and possibly even digging up Windflower and seeing if
it's worth continuing. I'm actually kind of excited about this.
It's a little strange having a manager take this much of a hand in
setting priorities; I've worked in a series of small shops and, up
'til now, have been left more or less on my own nearly the whole
time. It does feel good to get a bit of direction, though. I mean, I
know what needs to be done and I'm doing it, but I've always felt a
bit lost trying to decide what's most important for everyone once past
the finger-in-the-dike stage.
Now to go try and get Multi-TTY working on this laptop…
Ack: Just realized I never described the lingering problems with
Solaris 10. Fairly simple to describe: LDAP lookups take 'way longer
than they should (ls -l /home/ can take 5 seconds per line
sometimes), and JDS on the SunRays is slower in parts than it should
be (click on the logout button, wait 60 seconds, message pops up
saying "Are you shure you want to log out?"). I'm hopeful I can track
those down without too much effort…
Tags:
emacs
solaris
upgrades
windows