01 Jun 2006
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.
Tags:
amd
cfengine
windows
30 May 2006
title: Witness the up long grass!
date: 2006-05-30 05:44:47
I've finally got Danconia up and running OpenBSD 3.9. It's now officially my firewall box, taking over duties from Rearden (Debian desktop machine). As always, the simplicity and featurefullosityness of pf just astounds me. A simple thing like not loading the rules if there's a syntax error is such a butt-saver, I'm amazed it hasn't been implemented in iptables or ipfw. (Of course, pf loads all the rules at once, rather than one at a time, so it's a different approach...but still.)
Next step is to get my IPv6 tunnel from HE up and running. I hadn't realized it, but OpenBSD does not use stf, the 6to4 IPv6 interface, because of security concerns. I'm gonna have to do some reading on this, I think. (Incidentally, why does this link say RFC 3694 is a "Threat Analysis of the Geopriv Protocol"?)
I've ordered a replacement power supply for the dying XBox I'm using for a MythTV frontend. It had been behaving badly for a while after the move, and then finally it just would not find the hard drive at all. The HD was fine -- I could plug it into another box and it'd work great (though in the process I had another hard drive actually catch fire -- 3" flame and all -- which was a pisser) -- and it could boot from a CD just fine. What's left? That's right, the power supply. Well, I hope so, anyhow. Inna meantime, I've set up the backend as a frontend; other than some occasional odd slowness deleting previously recorded shows, it's working fine.
Finally, as of last Friday [five years][8]. Since we're such hopeless romantics, I gave her a cupcake from Tim Horton's, and she gave me this fine dollar store sculpture:
We saw it a few weeks ago and it cracked me up. And then I read the label:
As I have, as instructed, planted the elucidation, I will be posting pictures as I witness the up long grass.
We are also less than one month from The Due Date. I am busy doing practical things like putting up smoke alarms, baking food to put in the freezer, and insisting that we pack the hospital bag now. Clara has shown amazing patience with my sudden neurotic compulsion to be A Responsible AdultTM.
[8]: http://torturedpotato.com/cheeseblogmy wife and I have
been married <a href=
Tags:
19 May 2006
title: SNMP Heartbreak
date: 2006-05-19 05:44:40
I'm still trying to get Heartbeat all working on the two file
servers at work. The bit that's getting me down is STONITH -- in
particular, the apcmastersnmp plugin.
For some reason, it just will not send out the SNMP request saying
"reboot that there outlet". It's not very specific about why,
either. The weird thing (well, one of a few) is that running the
stonith command will send the request (once you figure out the
goddamned syntax for the config file...Christ on a crutch, the
documentation is poor), but the hearbeat process itself, which just
calls the library directly rather than using the stonith command,
does not.
strace shows that heartbeat forks off a child to send the
request. That child then goes about closing all its file descriptors,
then trying to sendto(2) on a file descriptor (socket descriptor?)
that's one of the bunch it just closed. We get EBADF, then it logs the
failure.
(This is a little further than I was getting, BTW; it turns out to be
essential to put the MIB file for the PDU into
/usr/share/snmp/mibs. I didn't think about that, but it makes
sense.)
So I've compiled a debug version of heartbeat (Debian rocks:
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=debug,nostrip dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot and
away you go), and it turns out to be snmp_synch_response that's
failing. Of course, that's in the NET-SNMP library, so now I'm
preparing to compile a debug version of that and see what's going
on.
I'm of two minds on this. Failover would really be a good thing, and I
can't do it w/o STONITH. And I hate like hell to just give up and say,
"Oh, it's too hard for me." OTOH, this is just taking so damned long,
and it is an older version (though it is the one in stable). I may
take a look at the 2.0 series and see how that works...just hope I
don't have to throw away all this work. <grumble / >
Tags:
09 May 2006
title: From A Motel 6
date: 2006-05-09 05:51:11
Came across a weird problem on the firewall at work last week. It's
running 4-STABLE, and was last updated about a month ago. It's got
fxp0 for an outside interface, and em0 plus a bunch of vlan
devices for inside interfaces.
When I added either of these two rules:
ipfw allow tcp from 192.168.16.34 to 192.168.19.33 1230,1236 keep-state via vlan19
ipfw allow tcp from 192.168.19.33 to 192.168.16.34 1230,1237 keep-state via vlan19
then suddenly DNS queries from inside our main LAN (192.168.0.0/24 on
em0) to outside servers -- say, our main inside nameserver doing
recursive queries for A records for Google -- stopped working: queries
would pass through natd and go out with the source address changed,
but the reply from the server would be accepted by the firewall box,
rather than passed to natd and then back inside to the machine
that'd made the query. Since the firewall box hadn't made the request,
it would send back an ICMP port-unreachable packet to the outside
nameserver. In other words:
- 192.168.0.2 -> ns.google.com: www.google.com A?
- 192.168.0.1 (firewall box) passes that to
natd
natd changes packet to...- firewall outside IP -> ns.google.com: www.google.com A?
- ns.google.com -> firewall outside IP: www.google.com A 1.2.3.4
- firewall accepts that packet...
- ...but realizes it doesn't have anything listening for a UDP packet from ns.google.com...
- ...and rejects it:
- firewall outside IP -> ns.google.com: ICMP port-unreachable
Took me most of the day to figure this out, because I found a separate
problem and was convinced that these rules had nothing to do with
it. And they don't, really -- wrong protocol, wrong interface, wrong
addresses -- but remove the rules and everything's fine. Freakin'
bizarre.
I spent a lot of time checking out state rules and such, and I'm
pretty certain that's not it. At this point, I'm assuming that it's
either a bug in ipfw (possibly related to this PR, or my
upgrade from 4.8 to 4-STABLE did not go as cleanly as I thought. I'm
going to try installing FreeBSD here and see if I can duplicate
this...maybe get another one-character patch into FreeBSD. Woot!
Tags:
07 May 2006
title: oz2remind 0.2
date: 2006-05-07 11:34:06
The second release of oz2remind is now available for your GPL'd
pleasure. Now, it'll convert from Remind format to OpenZaurus format:
it'll either parse your .reminders file directly, or (recommended)
parse the output of remind -n -b1 -s. You can check out the
Freshmeat page, or just go and grab it now.
Tags:
01 May 2006
title: Let's Burn Tony Orlando's House
date: 2006-05-01 05:52:30
Spent some time this weekend trying to get wireless working. I've got
the WRT54G on the second floor, and my wife's iBook on the first. The
iBook will pick up the signal more or less fine, but if you put it to
sleep and come back in an hour (say), it won't find the signal
anymore. I suspect it's the iBook's fault, but I can't be sure since I
haven't got another wireless notebook to check it with.
As I mentioned, the signal the iBook gets is decent, but it surprises
me how much depends on the orientation of the antennae -- which, on
the iBook, means what angle you've got the monitor at. I built a
couple of these antennas, and that does seem to help a bit. Plus
it's just fun making something with cardboard and tape and aluminum
foil...feels like I'm in grade one again. :-)
On Friday I had to set up a new Windows workstation for the first time
in a while, and I remembered these guys. They've done a metric
buttload of work since I last checked in with them (Lord, a year
now?) We use this program at work to automate software installs on
Windows machines, and even though we had problems setting it up
(mainly getting it to run as a service using Cygwin's cygrunsrv)
it's saved us a ton of time getting new workstations ready. I think
it's time I took another look at using it for ongoing maintenance,
rather than just first installs.
Slowly getting my OpenBSD firewall put together. It'd be cool to use
the WRT, of course, but then I wouldn't get to use the 3.9 CD set I
just bought. It still amazes me that I can put together a firewall
using pf and not lock myself out.
Marcin posted recently that he got Linux working on his own
WRT1133 clone. Rather than bother uploading an image to flash, though,
he used OpenOCD to write the image to memory using a JTAG
cable. I hadn't heard of OpenOCD before, and this raises the
possibility of getting Flash writes working from Linux by
watching what the original bootloader does when it loads another
image.
My father has started a blog. I was going to write, "Now if only
my uncle would post again...", but he beat me to it.
Oh, and the favicon comes courtesy of Chris. Many thanks!
Finally, my friend ZenRender has just got a haircut after, like,
at least eleven years of rampant hippiedom. (He did get it partly cut
last year, but I call that chickening out.) Of course, he still looks
like a damned Communist.
Tags:
23 Apr 2006
I've been setting up OpenVPN on my wife's iBook, using 3.0-RC2 of
Tunnelblick. It works well, but I did come across one bit of
weirdness.
I'm using OpenVPN in bridging mode. The network looks like this:
iBook <-> WRT54G <-> Home Network <-> Firewall <-> Internet
When OpenVPN bridging is going on, the iBook appears to be sitting on
the Home Network. During testing, I was able to ping the Firewall box
and other boxes on the Home Network, but I was unable to connect to
websites on the Internet, and pinging Internet hosts got me this
error:
ping: sendto: No buffer space available
ping: wrote www.google.ca 64 chars, ret=-1
I've run into this problem before, but the last time it was
because one end of the tunnel went down -- not the case now.
I tried looking at netstat -m but it all looked good:
98 mbufs in use:
94 mbufs allocated to data
3 mbufs allocated to socket names and addresses
1 mbufs allocated to Appletalk data blocks
145/368 mbuf clusters in use
760 Kbytes allocated to network (41% in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
0 calls to protocol drain routines
...which pretty much matches what I've seen when I've had this message
before in other situations. netstat -s was a little more
interesting:
icmp:
266 calls to icmp_error
0 errors not generated 'cuz old message was icmp
Output histogram:
echo reply: 2
destination unreachable: 266
0 messages with bad code fields
0 messages < minimum length
0 bad checksums
0 messages with bad length
0 multicast echo requests ignored
0 multicast timestamp requests ignored
Input histogram:
echo reply: 865
destination unreachable: 284
routing redirect: 18
echo: 2
2 message responses generated
ICMP address mask responses are disabled
"Destination unreachable"? WTF? I had a look at the interfaces, and
saw three tap instances. Not only that: tap1 was the one being
used by Tunnelblick, but tap0 was the default gateway. That can't be
right, right? Right. Turned out there was another, older instance of
OpenVPN running that should've been killed long ago. Kill that, kill
Tunnelblick, restart Tunnelblick, and all is well.
I'm hoping I won't have this crop up again; it's not in my wife's
nature to start looking for rogue tap interfaces screwing up the
routing tables if her Internet connection goes down. :-)
One other problem I had with the WRT54G was bridging and setting the
time. See, OpenVPN starts at boot on this thing, and it needs a tap
interface. Since we're doing bridging, it needs to be bridged to the
outside interface -- vlan1 on OpenWRT, the Linux firmware I'm
using. In order to make that work, I get the firewall script to create
the bridge right before it runs all the firewall rules. That happens
right before OpenVPN starts, which happens right before OpenNTPD
runs, which happens right before the boot scripts finish and we're
open for business. Firewall, then OpenVPN, then OpenNTPD. Got it?
Setting the time is important because otherwise OpenVPN will complain
that the iBook is connecting using an SSL certificate that's not valid
yet, and refuses to connect. Well, no problem -- ntpd -s takes care
of that, right? Wrong: every time I checked the date, the time was
1999. (Yeah, I could've tried to set the hardware clock to something
more reasonable, but that's a stupid hack.)
ntpd -s was running but not setting the time. tcpdump on my NTP
server showed that there were no NTP requests coming from the WRT
after it booted. Yet I could kill ntpd, start it up again, and it
would set the time right away. I tried ntpclient, but it behaved in
exactly the same way.
In the end, I couldn't find out what was going on. I suspect it's a
problem related to the bridge I set up -- ntpd binds to vlan1,
then for some reason things stop working once the bridge is set up. I
can't be sure without a serial port, though -- still haven't figured
out logging on this thing -- so I used a slightly less awful hack:
running ntpclient to set the time just before bridging starts, then
running openntpd after as usual. It just dodges the problem, rather
than fixing it, but it works.
Tags:
20 Apr 2006
Arghh. For weeks now, I've been trying to track down why a couple of
XP laptops have had random print jobs drop to the floor. I finally got
to the point last week where I could reliably duplicate the problem
(print four emails from Outlook in quick succession; only three show
up, no error on the printer), and today I spent six hours figuring out
where the hell the problem was. (I didn't intend to spend that long,
but the combination of vociferous complaints and sheer bull-headedness
got to me.)
For no particularly good reason, the laptop in question is set to
print to the local HP 4200 using IPP. When I looked at the traffic in
Ethereal, I noticed that the failing job had a subtly different
response to the print job submission from the printer, and at the
end the TCP stream was only closed by the laptop -- the printer ACKed
right away but did not FIN its end. Aha! Firmware bug!
The printer repair guy who's been working with me to try and fix this
stopped by to take a look, and decided to call HP support. Their
response: Don't Do That, Then. Apparently, IPP is a weird protocol to
use for a LAN and I should really print to port 9100 like everyone
else.
Okay, yes, this worked, and it was a stupid amount of time to spend on
this problem. But it irritates me that they weren't interested in
(what I think is) a firmware bug, and that I'll never probably never
get to the bottom of what was going on. Although I'm pretty sure that
the JetDirect card just uses an embedded ARM processor; I could just
try looking at the firmware with a disassembler...:-)
In other news, something's going subtly wrong with the WRT54G; the
bridging of OpenVPN's tap0 interface and the external ethernet
interface has stopped working. The internal ethernet interface still
works, and if you SSH in that way and run ifconfig vlan0 down ;
ifconfig vlan0 up the external interface starts working again. I'm
also having problems with the wireless interface. I suspect the
bridging may be involved there, too, since it's bridged with the
internal ethernet. However, I only have my wife's iBook to test with,
so I can't be sure it's not a problem with that.
And my OpenBSD 3.9 CDs are in. Hurray! Time to finally get this
firewall off my desktop machine.
Tags:
bsd
bugs
15 Apr 2006
Version 0.3 of Windflower, the command-line-only, runnable-via-SSH
Perl wrapper around the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, is now
ready for download. Improvements include:
- Verbose and talk-only modes
- Note re: MBSA initialization
- Allow specification of passive options for each patch, rather than counting on "/passive /quiet /norestart"
- Handle case where there are more than one set of items has been checked for patches (for example: both Office and Windows)
- Will tell you where patch can be downloaded, if not found on local repository
- Only reboot if patches actually applied (!)
- General cleanup of hacky Perl
It's not perfect -- it won't remove files after they're no longer
needed, and the documentation needs to be better -- but it's pretty
good.
Tags:
windows
09 Apr 2006
It has been a busy ten days, no lie. My wife and I moved into our new place with only minor difficulties. Tuesday, though, I came down with flu and spent the next three days lying on the couch, dozing through CNN Headline News (if you're gonna rot your brain, you gotta do it right) and gobbling Tylenol by the handful. So much for my plan to spend the week assembling all the Ikea furniture in the world...
The computers made it through okay, except for the XBox (used as a MythTV frontend). First the hard drive crapped out -- all sorts of hard errors during fscking, followed by scary looking errors about how it couldn't find init. Fortunately I had a spare 80GB Seagate Barracuda, so I installed Xebian v1.1.4. Worked well, and in fact it fixed the display-offset-an-inch-to-the-left-and-up problem I'd been unable to fix before, so that was good.
And then last night, it started behaving weirdly. First, it wouldn't play a program in MythTV -- it just sat there beeping whenever it accessed the drive. I tried power cycling, but then it just sat and beeped at the Cromwell BIOS screen without going any further. I tried searching for beeping hard drives/XBoxes, but this was all I could find. This morning it's fine, so I suspect overheating -- it is a little more enclosed than it was at our new place. We'll see if it happens again.
The new place has imposed some network changes, too. Our last place was an apartment -- all one floor, so it wasn't hard to snake cables around to hook up the XBox, my wife's laptop and so on. Now, though, my computers and the cable modem are on the second floor, and the laptop/XBox are on the first. And while this house is only about four years old, it doesn't have built-in CAT5. :-(
I had brief fantasies of just poking holes in MY drywall (pride of house ownership picks weird times to pop into my head) and snaking a cable down to the TV (which is almost directly underneath me right now), but gave up. Then I ran a cable from the second floor to the first, thinking I could just run it along the edge of the walls and hide it nicely. It was worth trying, but it really didn't work and even I thought it just looked ugly. Only one way to go: wireless.
Since the NWR04B's on hold, I decided to pick up a couple Linksys WRT54GLs and run OpenWRT on them. They arrived on Thursday, and w/in 15 minutes I'd voided the warranty by installing White Russian on them. :-)
Man, OpenWRT is nice -- it's exactly what I've been hoping to achieve on the NWR. I'm still working on the configuration for these things, but the basic idea is to have one on the second floor, running as an AP that the laptop can connect to, and one on the first floor running in client mode. The XBox will be connected to the client, and Hunsacker (MythTV backend) will be connected to the AP. The laptop will connect to the internal network using OpenVPN; probably the MythTV boxen will use OpenVPN as well. The AP will be sitting inside my internal network, rather than outside, but will be firewalled by itself and my gateway to only allow OpenVPN and SSH connections in or out. It's a bit more complicated than I've set up for a home network before, but it's starting to come together in my head.
Of course, I could just run the AP as the firewall itself -- Lord knows the thing could do it just fine. But I just ordered OpenBSD 3.9 a couple weeks ago (plus sent 'em a nice donation), and it'd be a shame to waste that.
Tags:
nwr04b
25 Mar 2006
title: Sendmail -> Upgrade
date: 2006-03-25 19:43:41
Stupid Sendmail bug. Our firewall was running FreeBSD 4.8 with lots of
patches, but this latest patch from FreeBSD didn't apply cleanly --
too many changes to Sendmail in the meantime, and I was just
completely uncomfortable trying to patch it myself.
Fortunately, we had a spare rackmount box (shhh!) that I was able to
do the upgrade on. I installed 4.8, rsynced it with the firewall box
(/etc, /var and /usr, rebuilt 4.8 world, then checked out a copy
of RELENG_4, rebuilt that version of world, and made sure
everything still worked.
I set up the MAC addresses of the interfaces to be the same as the
existing box, double-checked everything, then held my breath and
swapped cables. Success! A total of 37 seconds of downtime.
Of course, there were a few things that went wrong, but the most
serious was our IPv6 connectivity -- I borked the firewall moving it
over, and had to dig through /etc/rc.firewall6 to figure out what
I'd missed. Man, I hate the FreeBSD firewall scripts...they're a
good starting place, but I always end up replacing them with a
single-purpose, easy to maintain shell script -- none of this
digging-through-the-script-trying-to-find-the-right-variables-to-edit
nonsense.
Overall, I'm pretty happy...it went about as well as I could've hoped,
especially for having done it in, like, 24 hours. <Peggy
Hill>Ho-yeah!</Peggy Hill>
Tags:
22 Mar 2006
As I haven't written about the NWR04B in a while, I thought I'd
mention that it's because I haven't done anything with it in a
while. Part of it has just been buying a house, getting ready to move,
pregnant wife, and so on. But I've also just put it aside for a while,
as I wasn't making much progress on either writing to flash or getting
all the ethernet ports working. I may take it up again later this
year, but I suspect that the new kid and my wandering mind means it'll
be a while, if ever, before I return to it.
In other news: Just got a new Overland LoaderXpress at work yesterday,
and it's...interesting. Very simple machine once you take the cover
off: a plastic tape magazine in the middle, a robot arm along the
left, a double-height Ultrium 960 drive from HP at the back on the
right, a power supply in the middle on the right, and the control
board along the right-hand edge. That's pretty much it. (I may take
pictures, 'cos I'm just that big a geek.)
There were a couple little blemishes: the cover had half-fallen off
the tape drive and was lying at an angle; I had to push it back
on. And the two screws that were holding the tape drive in place were
loose and had to be screwed back on. I realize this is a budget
jukebox, but it's still $8000 list. Oh, and their sales guy doesn't
return calls. Weird.
Once I got the cover back on and put it in the server room, it wasn't
too hard to get it hooked up. I made the mistake of not attaching a
terminator before hooking up the SCSI cable -- don't do that! And I
had to recompile the kernel (the backup box runs FreeBSD) to add the
ch device. But once I got that figured out, getting Amanda to see it
was as simple as telling it the changer device (/dev/ch0) and the
changer script (chg-chio). Perfect!
One slight hiccup: Ulrium 3 drives will read Ultrium 1 tapes (of
which we have, oh, 50), but will only write Ultrium 2 and 3 tapes. I
didn't find this out 'til after I placed the order...my bad. This'll
change my backup plans a bit, but it shouldn't be a big problem.
Tags:
nwr04b
16 Mar 2006
title: Moby Octopad
date: 2006-03-16 19:18:38
- Taking days off after lots of days working is fun. I am sitting at home, drinking good beer, and I don't have to go in tomorrow. (At least, not at this point in time.) Very, very cool.
- Learning stuff is cool. I am booted into a Belanix live CD right now on my wife's former computer (she went for the iBook after random hardware problems). I don't know what's going on. I hardly know where to find things. Startup scripts on this thing are beyond my ken.
ps and ifconfig take weird options. And I'm having the time of my life.
That is all.
Tags:
13 Mar 2006
I ran into The Neptune Project a while back; they're running
sensors along the ocean floor off the west coast of North America, and
then hooking 'em up via 100Mbit ethernet back to the lab. This lets
you do continuous observation, rather than sending down a probe for an
hour or two. Very neat stuff; they just got their first pictures
from the bottom of Saanich Inlet.
Welp, now they're looking for a sysadmin. If the timing was a
little better I'd throw in a resume...but having just bought a house
w/my pregnant wife, the timing's a little off. :-)
Tags:
employment
13 Mar 2006
More fallout today from Saturday's power outage: two workstations
that failed to boot up (BIOS checksum error for one of 'em, which is a
new one for me), some NIS-related services that didn't get started
properly (not sure what's going on there), and so on. Plus the return
of the where-are-those-seven-machines? that didn't get done on Friday
because of all of this.
But I did learn some stuff about Cfengine. For example, if you have
something like:
my_url = ( http://www.example.com/foo/bar )
then you'd better precede it with:
or some other character that isn't used. The colon is treated as a
list separator by default, which means that later on, when you try and
do something like:
shell::
linux.need_some_file:
"/bin/wget $(my_url)/baz"
what it'll actually do is this:
/bin/wget http/baz
/bin/wget //www.example.com/foo/bar/baz
'cos it's iterating over the two lists, see?
And SuSE's dhcp client, by default (I think), will change
/etc/yp.conf without telling you, and then on exit put back the old
version (saved conveniently at /etc/yp.conf.sv. It took me a long
time to figure out that this was happening, and it pissed me off
mightily. /etc/resolv.conf is filled with comments when the dhcp
client modifies it -- hell, they even throw in the PID. So why not do
that with yp.conf? At least you can turn it off by changing
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_NIS_CONF in /etc/sysconfig/networking/dhcp.
Tags:
cfengine
12 Mar 2006
title: Weekend? What weekend?
date: 2006-03-12 13:38:56
On Friday morning a transformer blew up at my work's building and we
lost maybe a third of the outlets. It wasn't as bad as it could've
been, since we kept power to the servers.
In the middle of dealing with that, I was told that there were seven
new machines that had to be on the network, like, now. A thought
that B knew that when A talked about test machines, A meant machines
that had working home directories. B didn't know that. A also thought
B knew that the test machines were needed now. B didn't know that.
Friday afternoon we were told that power would be down Saturday from
8am to 1pm while they fixed it. I ran around letting people know and
asking if anything needed to be turned on in a special order. (Some of
our equipment is a little mysterious for the likes of me.)
Saturday morning I was in at 7am shutting down the network and
unplugging everything I could. Saturday afternoon at 1pm I was back to
turn things on, only the work wasn't done and no one could tell me
when it would be back up. Did some small maintenance jobs but couldn't
really tackle anything big w/o power to at least boot up the
machines. Called people to let them know what was going on.
This morning I was in at 6.30 am and hallelujah, the power was back
on. I did some other maintenance, then started bringing things back in
earnest. It all went pretty well except for a fileserver with a bum
disk. Arghh. Currently letting that freeze in hopes it'll start
working again so I can then rsync all the data off to the big-ass
fileserver, while waiting for cold meds to kick in.
After that, it's off to dinner for my father-in-law's birthday...I
hope. It's 1.30pm and I'm still not sure I'm going to make it.
Tags:
04 Mar 2006
title: oz2remind
date: 2006-03-04 22:26:01
First release of oz2remind has been unleashed upon an
unsuspecting world. Using Perl's XML::Simple, it converts the
datebook.xml file from OpenZaurus/Opie's calendar app to Remind
format.
Tags:
04 Mar 2006
title: Return to hot chicken
date: 2006-03-04 10:33:14
I have found the perfect calendar program and the perfect front end. Just dig this screenshot:
This is exactly what I want.
Tags:
04 Mar 2006
title: I Can Feel The Heart Beating As One
date: 2006-03-04 09:16:54
My wife's computer is working fine now that I've put it in my
room. :-) Double plus good, since she wants to move to the iBook and I
get a nice AMD 2600. Woohoo!
As for what was going on...dunno. Random shorting, maybe? It's awfully
dusty in there, so maybe that would affect things too. 'Tany rate,
weird.
Now to figure out how to add all her Evolution mailboxes to Apple
Mail.
Tags:
03 Mar 2006
Checked my email this morning and saw that backups of my wife's
computer had timed out. Weird, I thought, but didn't look into it
further. Then my wife comes out and says, "Hey, my computer's having a
stroke.". Uh-oh.
So I have a look and it's constantly, randomly, power cycling. It will
get to the Ubuntu splash page then shut off, then get halfway through
the BIOS check and shut off, then get halfway through boot and shut
off, then stay off for two minutes, then turn on again. WTF?
First thought is cooling, of course. But the power supply feels cool
to the touch, and when I get to the BIOS temperature page it says the
CPU is at 51C -- eminently reasonable. (Then it shut itself off.)
Okay, flaky RAM? Wonky graphics card? Dying, though not from lack of
cooling, power supply?
Then it makes it all the way to Ubuntu's login page. I switch to a
console and start looking at logs. This thing has been rebooting all
night -- as in log messages about how shutdown has been invoked. And
then I check /var/log/acpid and I see lots and lots and lots of
entries saying that event POWERBTN (or some such) had been receieved,
so Ubuntu was executing /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh and shutting down
nicely. And then I saw a broadcast message from root saying that the
system was going down for reboot NOW!
Tempted to just try booting w/o ACPI, but I think that would just mask
the issue. Back to Google...
Tags:
hardware
