<\/p>\nOkay, this one’s gonna be long, but it’s worth it… past all the techweenie stuff is some very amusing personal tragedy.<\/p>\n
So let’s back up to last night about 7pm. I get home first for a change, and I sit down at my computers to get the network up and running. See, I have this ideal in my head where every computer in the house (yes, there are at least 7) can connect to the internet, and print to the printers, and in an ideal world, see each other via Microsoft Networking, although I think I’m going to settle for just having a common file server to dump stuff on.<\/p>\n
The central focus for all my efforts lies in the hands of a single machine, oh so lovingly named “habitrail,” my Linux machine, which has been serving as my gateway\/webserver\/MP3 storage site for the last two years.
\n
\nThe problem with habitrail is that it’s a Pentium MMX 166. It’s very slow. I’ve since upgraded the hard drives and memory, but that means nothing if it takes 10 minutes to boot and an hour to compile the kernel. I think I’m going to buy a new motherboard soon, so I can use the P2 I’ve got lying around. But I digress.<\/p>\n
The first step was getting Samba running on habitrail. It seems to be running, and has been running, for the last few months, but it’s been systematically denying every request. Which is odd, because random people seem to be trying to connect to the machine. I finally got it to accept connections from the local network, but then it asks for a password that I can’t seem to get it to recognize. At this point I decided that maybe I actually needed something to be shared, so I sidetrack and decide to try and get the printer (which is currently connected to my PC, but on the ethernet) shared. After about an hour, I realize that if I just plugged the printer directly into habitrail, it might make my life easier. About an hour after that I realize that parallel port support on habitrail wasn’t compiled into the last kernel I built. About an hour after that, I had a new kernel compiling… which of course didn’t run because (silly me) I compiled it for Pentium III (which is the default in the configure script). About an hour later I have the kernel running, then realize the modules need to be compiled too. An hour later, the modules are installed, and I’m getting some weird error on startup that I’m going to have to look into later<\/i>.<\/p>\n
So if you do the math, I’ve just spent about five hours on this problem, and the only thing I’ve got going for me is a refresher course in how much I hate configuring Linux.<\/p>\n
At this point, I give up, decide to spend the last few waking moments taking a shower, playing some GBA Castlevania, and reading some Discworld.<\/p>\n
At 1:30 I lie down to go to sleep, turn off the light, and have some trouble falling asleep because of a weird tapping noise. It seems to be coming from outside the window, but I can’t figure out where it’s coming from. I walk downstairs and out onto the balcony, and I figure out that it’s coming from the drainpipe directly outside my window. It seems there’s a bend in the drainpipe because of some decorative moulding and there was water dripping down (from what I figure is the air conditioning). I’ve prepared a diagram:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As you can see, the dripping is either coming from point a or point b. Either way, it’s very annoying, quite loud, and almost<\/i> regular, but not regular enough… it’s like listening to a broken metronome, which to a left-brained person like me, is (if you refer to the subject line) torturous. And it’s not going away. I’m either going to have to cope with it, get someone to fix the drainpipe, or go up on the roof and see if I can redirect the a\/c output to somewhere else.. like a big pan or bucket or something.<\/p>\n
So I finally fall asleep and wake up quite late again to the sound of the house phone ringing. (Which is a change, the last few days this week I’ve woken up at 7am by the painters outside my window.) A few seconds later my cel phone rings, and it’s my mom… 5 seconds later my phone shuts off and discharges its battery. The house phone rings again, and I rush into the office and pick it up one ring too late. I then have to call her back, because she has no idea where I am, after all no one answered the phone here twice already now. So I call her back, and get on with my morning routine… which suddenly becomes not so routine when the toilet overflows.<\/p>\n
Bah.<\/p>\n
We don’t own a plunger, but we will shortly. I tried the old “garbage bag over your hand” trick, but couldn’t get it unstuck (for those of you out there who are squeamish, relax, it was just toilet paper). I gave up and just went to work.<\/p>\n
So, it’s getting long, so for what happened today<\/i>. I accidentally sent a mail from the wrong machine, so I decided I’d get sendmail actually working on habitrail, as part of my “dump Verio.net completely” plan involves getting rid of the shell account they provide me.<\/p>\n
Long story short, after about two hours of fiddling I determine that the reason why the emails aren’t showing up on habitrail is because sendmail wasn’t actually running<\/i>. I feel like such a newbie.<\/p>\n
Oh well, I’m gonna be leaving here soon anyway, and I’m going down to Southern California this weekend for my brother’s graduation (among other things) for a very very busy weekend.<\/p>\n
It appears that I’m running out of full days to get the rest of my stuff out of my apartment… I’m gonna have to start making a lot of time after work quite a few days to get the crap out so I can actually clean the place.<\/p>\n
Okay that’s it… longest post ever is now over<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay, this one’s gonna be long, but it’s worth it… past all the techweenie stuff is some very amusing personal tragedy. So let’s back up to last night about 7pm. I get home first for a change, and I sit down at my computers to get the network up and running. See, I have this … <\/p>\n