greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Fun with Redirects and Multiple Servers

    Instead of leaving Zero’s webserver shut down, I’ve decided instead to have her index page redirect to this journal page, just like the index page here on greyduck.net itself. Slick, huh?

    There’s a method to my madness, of course. Now I can use Zero’s webserver to do various “extra” things that Invite’s servers aren’t really set up to do, like provide the randomized email address trick. (It should be working now. Feel free to test it! The link is right below the Calendar.)

    The relationship between greyduck.net and zero.kgon.com is now firmly incestuous. Fun, no?

  • Where I’m at, where I’m going.

    Last night went rather well, all things considered. I’m quite pleased. I came in this morning and there was no lynch mob outside my door… that’s always a good sign.

    Today? I’m rebuilding Yet Another Promotions Computer, this time the scannerbox. I was hoping to just repair Photoshop, but it just didn’t go as planned, so once again it’s start from scratch. Ah well, it’s what they pay me for, isn’t it?

    I’m having problems with display corruption on Ryoko with the Mozilla browser. Maybe it’s the nVidia drivers, maybe it’s X, maybe it’s Mozilla, maybe it’s XScreensaver. We’ll find out, won’t we?

    Oh, and I think I have nearly every Cowboy Bebop mp3 available anywhere. Yay! Lots of good listening… though also lots of weird listening.

  • AMV.org

    One of the hobbies I’m more-or-less involved in right now is the viewing, reviewing and creation of Anime Music Videos, or AMVs. I’m a member of the animemusicvideos.org website, although certainly not the most active or elite member.

    So what’s this I’m rambling about? Well, you take some Japanese animation footage, preferably from DVD. Take a song from CD. Get some sort of video editing software. Spend weeks of your life cutting, previewing, tinkering, cussing and fussing. At the end, you have a hand-crafted music video the likes of which MTV has never seen.

    It’s cool, dammit. Check it out.
    animemusicvideos.org

  • Netware upgrades, among other things.

    Someone else got a package in the mail today. Lucky for me, inside that package was another package with my name on it. What’s inside, you ask? A pair of CD-ROM discs, one for each of my Entercom-network Netware servers.

    So here it is, 8pm Tuesday night and I’m running service pack installs. They said they wanted it done ASAP, and this is about as ASAP as it gets.

    Another thing I did today was to (finally!) put together a spreadsheet detailing which Linux boxes have what version of the different daemons and services. This will help to deal with those security alerts and what-not. For instance, this was my chance to upgrade to proftpd 1.2.5rc1 to deal with a security hole in previous releases. (I actually dialed down proftpd on a couple of machines… no point!)

    If all goes well (and there’s no reason why it should) I could be home in a couple of hours.
    ProFTPd website

  • Just Another Sunday

    So it was another three-weeks Sunday visit yesterday. Do the backup of the AS/400. Check. Do the email maintenance. Check. Fix Carol Soler’s display problem. Check. Rebuild a computer for Jason Parrish. Check.

    I also managed to do some neat things to Ryoko’s Linux side. It’s my second attempt at doing Linux from scratch and I must say that I’m very, very pleased with the results. No more RPM dependencies! No more mismatched libraries! No more mysterious distro clutter! I love it.

    Next up for Ryoko? E-17 if I can manage it.

  • Near Miss With Ryoko’s LFS

    Here’s something all Linux newbies and journeymen should tape to every monitor in their office:

    When switching Linux systems from one root partition to another, always check the bootloader config carefully when making any changes to the bootloader of any kind.

    For instance, today I tried to completely hose my LFS rig. How? By removing all references to my stub Mandrake install from lilo.conf and running ‘lilo -v’ to update. Great, but there’s a problem. My old lilo.conf also had this problem, but I fixed it. Which is to say, I had the wrong partition marked as ‘root = ‘ in the lilo.conf. This error was in both copies of said file… and while I fixed it on one, I didn’t fix it in the other.

    So there I am, staring at the kernel panic message from the fact that it was trying to use my old /usr partition as the / partition. Idiot. It’s a damned good thing you can pass the ‘root = ‘ parameter at boot time!

    Have I mentioned that I love Linux? No? Well, I do. It’s even good enough to let clumsy oafs such as myself get back out of the trouble they put themselves into.

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