renaissance poisson

especially for the wimmins, or at least the skinny ones with long hair. the reg makes all the feminist commentary necessary, so i don't have to.

via azz on #dw.

dear dell. do make sure all the laptops have flowery pastel designs.

http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html

what a perfect machine for the boat. and the price tag ain't bad either.

dear self --

whether you actually need to print anything or not, do not leave your printer sitting around for two months without printing a page every week or so. because gravity sucks. and printheads clog. they clog so badly that regular maintenance self-cleaning will no longer manage to clear them.

and then you have to remove the printhead and try to unclog it.

and that's not how you wanted to spend tonight or possibly even longer.

so i couldn't get the internal network to work last night. that had me completely stumped because i have a pretty decent catalogue of things that can go wrong in my head, and i had run through all of them twice. or so i thought.

it helps to sleep. i got up and pondered "hm. well, theoretically it could be the cable itself". i had checked the connections the night before, but didn't replace the cable. ok. replaced the patch cable. nope, that didn't change anything. *sigh*. i stared at the hub in frustration.

wait. there were no lights on the hub. none at all.

checked the power cable. it had come loose. replugged it. tested. internal network fine now. *duh*.

in my defense, i did originally check that everything was plugged in, before i started with the whole process -- that's a pretty standard first item. but the plug must have come loose when i was rerouting another cable underneath -- i can't see the hub from where i am sitting. and the plug connection is a bit loose. i think i might tape that.

anyway. am now upgrading the system, since i haven't done that since before i went to montréal. save this post, and reboot. oh, and i think i might've figured out what got into lilo's craw -- it could be that during a previous upgrade lilo was not actually rerun properly after the kernel image got installed. and if the location of the kernel image changes, even if the kernel itself and its size don't, well, lilo doesn't like that (with good reason).

had the first power outage of the season, and it was long; 6+ hours. got to burn some candles and make tea on the camp stove.

thanks to the UPSs, everything shut down cleanly. but when the power finally came back up, aegis didn't. got an error message from LILO i had never seen before: "EBDA is big: kernel setup stack overlaps LILO second stage."

it really sucks when the gateway goes down, because it runs both the connection to the outside as also the inside network. and it's been a while since i last needed to connect another system to the ADSL. telus permits us two MAC addresses, but of course the second system was still set to my laptop, which no longer has a functioning screen. i wasn't looking forward to figuring out how to change the second MAC address without having net access (it involves finding a working modem and the right dialup numbers). but good news, telus has actually spiffed up its network, and as soon as one connects, one gets an IP address within a local network, and they pop up the registration website for the MAC addresses. this is so much better than it used to be. i should remember to write them with my compliments.

so now i am on drynwyn connected to the ADSL and finding out what i can do about the LILO problem. this is a good time for that rescue floppy. i actually have one, yay. well, i had one. it seems to have gone bad just sitting around for more than a year without being used. the slightly older rescue floppy is also bad. clearly my sysadmin skills need some upgrading; i should build rescue CDs, since we only have one floppy drive left anyway, and floppies are really old tech now.

that's giving me the opportunity to learn about the mac's capabilities in the CD burning department. so far i've burned one that's not bootable, and have figured out that i need to use disk utility instead. alright. now downloading somebody else's rescue image.

the main problem with running debian on our gateway has turned out to be that things don't go wrong often enough, and i therefore don't get a lot of practice solving problems, and that means i have to do research every time. i guess it's back to documenting everything in detail, and in hardcopy this time.

here's why i am not buying another HP computer EVER unless you're changing your stupid ways:

the paramour's brandnew machine apparently needed an official BIOS upgrade. directly from HP. zie ran it. it hosed the system, which no longer can boot anything, not from its regular linux and windows partitions, not from the official rescue partition, not from the official rescue CD. re-flashing the old one won't work because guess what? the HP-specific flash utility requires windows to be running. that's beyond retarded. usually the overclockers come to the rescue, but not in this case; none of the generic flash utilities can handle HP's BIOS.

so now we get to ship the entire computer off to ontario so HP can put another BIOS chip in. at their cost, mind, but we'll be out the use of the machine for the entire time it's gone.

next computer we buy i'll make sure the manufacturer isn't this cozy in bed with microsoft, because this is not "progress".

oh, and? outsourcing tech support is a fine idea IF THE PEOPLE TO WHOM YOU OUTSOURCE ARE COMPETENT. no, we do not need to reformat the hard drive to solve this problem. which part of "it doesn't boot from the rescue CD" did you fail to understand? oh, and while i have you on the line: what is this bullshit about only being allowed to make a single rescue CD? your crippled rescue crap that doesn't allow me full access to the system is turning me into a software pirate, you know that? if i pay for the OS, i want the real goddamn fucking OS, not some cobbled-together, branded piece of rot that couldn't rescue itself from an open paper bag.

*fume*.

y'know -- it originally took me a relatively long time to switch from redhat to debian. inertia was mostly responsible for that, i knew my way around redhat, so the *poing* waxing excitedly about debian wasn't quite enough. zie did eventually wear me down though.

right now i am back on a redhat system, since i am waiting for my laptop IDE adapter before i am wiping all of this and install my own stuff. and *wah*, i want my debian!

but at least i have a network connection, a browser running, and IM working. oh, and mahjongg. :) i am contemplating installing NFS back on aegis, so i can remotely mount my image drive and work on digicam pictures in the gimp, but really, i shouldn't. still, it is much better than nothing. my answer to the "what will you take to a lonely island with you" question shall have to be a satellite-linked computer so i can look up what plants are edible.

speaking of plants, nothing happened in the garden because it wasn't just raining cats and dogs today but also pigs and cows. i'm not complaining, i like the rain. here in BC april showers bring may showers, and apparently this year also june showers.

we have a new stray kitten living in the attic, a little calico. *sigh*.

finally, months later, i've come upon the solution to my firewall spilling billions and billions of log messages all over aegis's console.

no, i am not particularly fast about some things.

check your cable connections.

also, you can afford to replace that patch cable that no longer latches in because the little doohickey broke off.

that way you won't have to doubt your sanity when the system comes up after the power outage, but the internal network doesn't -- despite you not having changed anything since the last reboot, the correct driver module being loaded, and the firewall rules looking perfect.

of running debian is that things so rarely go wrong, that i've always forgotten how i solved a similar problem the last time. the system had been up without a hiccup for 250+ days.

today we had the first of our winter power outages. when aegis, the server came back up it kernel-panicked. by the time i finally found my notes (which kindly informed me that i had to add the initial ramdisk to the lilo config file after the last kernel upgrade, which i had forgotten to do), the paramour had gotten around to that via a different path. :)

and then we had network trouble. we always do; two of the NICs doesn't get auto-detected. these are cheap cards, do you think i remember what driver they need? hell, no. back to search for notes. the paramour went to bed (smart move). it didn't take me that long to figure it out when i didn't find any notes, but being that this isn't the first time, i should get my damn act together.

and then my win XP machine didn't want to play well with samba. it never does; it's so bad that i have taken everything but the WINS server away from it, and made aegis the primary domain controller. still, it seems that when aegis goes down, after it comes up, XP does not want to turn control back over, not even if i force a browser election. *grump*. this one really requires me to learn more about samba and how windows handles itself when communicating with it, and i don't know that i want to bother. this time it finally connected back up after i gave it back the WINS server, but i think that actually had nothing to do with it. it simply does have old, crappy data hanging around that it doesn't wipe when one would expect it to wipe it. *double grump*. *hates on microsoft*.

i resolve: i shall not keep notes about aegis start-up information in a file called "random.txt" in which i also store just about any other random tidbits i come across (such as the measurements for the bed i am going to build, instructions to make a cheap baren for woodblock printing, interesting quotes, egyptian gods, a snarky email i recided not to send, the japanese names for symmetry used in patterns, a couple of 5-question memes i forgot to post, etc). i shall put the aegis notes into their own file. i shall print that file. i shall affix the printout to aegis in a manner that does not attract cats.