EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I respect that. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.
Good morning! Welcome to Monday. Taking off with a roaring start, things skid to a halt as I realize that the simple changes I made to the backup script broke it. The good news is that, fair or foul, the script sends me an email to describe its adventures. In this case, it was something like "cowardly, tar refuses to create an empty archive...", all because I left a backslash off an ignore directory line.
Why change? Well, the ETS trial pages that I brought down here come out to many, many megabytes, and I don't have a lot of spare space on my nightly tape. (I know, but I do a full backup of specific directories each night, rather than an incremental). So I added a line to the backup script '--exclude /home/httpd/html/bpages/newsite \', only no backslash. So all the following lines of the tar command, all the directories that are supposed to be backed up, weren't.
Now for a repeat of one of Saturday's paragraphs:
I've brought down my development work on the new version of the ETS website locally, if you'd care to have a look and tell me what you think about the upgrade. Most of the content and links are dead yet, but a few pages are live, here they are: The Home Page, The Products Overview Page, and the Multimedia Products Page, also About ETS. By way of comparison, here's the live site as of today. If you have a chance to look at those, I'd sure appreciate your opinion on the progress to date. Discerning browsers such as yourselves give me a good reality check. THANKS!!!
And with that, I think I'll head over to where the galley is berthed - there's a bench and an oar with my name on it... <g> Fly low and slow, keep under the radar, I'll catch up with y'all later.
Hello. How are you? Nice to see you back again. (all intoned in my best Fred Rogers imitation). I had a good, productive day yesterday. The morning was sucked up by meetings, but overall, things at the salt mine are progressing satisfactorily. Once back at my oar as a galley slave here, I poked out about another 10 pages of GUI System Administration yesterday afternoon and evening. The best part about the writing is all the little nooks and crannies that I am finding - it's fun learning a lot!
I put a wrap on it at about 8:15, deciding that I could easily finish and review the chapter today. Then I went to have a look at VNC. VNC is Open Source, GPL licenced Virtual Network Computing software. They have a lot of fancy words for it on the linked site, so let me put it to you this way. I can run VNC server on the two NT servers and one Linux server I have responsibility for at work, and using VNC Viewer (on Linux or Windows, but you know what my choice is) have windows containing the actual desktop of each of those servers available on my Gnome desktop. Forget KVM switches - run NT headless.
I've known about VNC for a while, but never quite got around to playing ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H working with it previously. However, a spate of email messages concerning VMware, VNC, VNC over SSH tunnels and more piqued my curiosity last afternoon and evening. I got it working between Win2k on Grinch and Mandrake on Gryphon. Today I'll do the server thing, and grab a screenshot or two. More later.
The time has come, I'll be on my way. Catch up with you later.
Home for writing for the afternoon, but thought I'd stop in to post this screenshot of our NT servers viewed across the network via VNC... There's two free monitors ready for assignment. I don't need this for the Linux server, 'cause I just ssh to a command line for that. Now back to work. TTFN.
Happy hump day! Once again it's the middle of someone's week, probably Joe Average. Oh, wait, Joe Average is loaded, if he's a high tech worker, at least according to this LA Times article. I read this within hours of it being posted, and the buzz is spreading over the net. Slashdot, Technocrat, Andover are the places I've seen references (but then I frequent those hangouts). Even if illegal drug use is up, it's a leading edge money kind of thing, just like the the yuppie/dink thing in the 80's. One commentator noted at Technocrat points out that the article smacks strongly of Reefer Madness style "journalism".
The short and long of it is that for anyone, in any industry or condition of life, at any time, can become addicted to a mood altering substance if that substance is used with enough regularity to habituate the user to its use. Period. The interval varies with the type and effect of the drug. There are also variations based on your genetic proclivity for addiction, enough that I believe that drug abuse is a disease of sorts. However, the cure rates are pathetically low. I know, as I came out the other side of that valley, after spending years working on myself and gathering the necessary karma to succeed. But I watch countless others fall by the wayside: dead, jailed, running or working the streets, but not living... not living.
I care a lot about this topic. It's always perking near the surface of my brain, because of my background - awareness is a great bit of armor against stupidity. Have you got any input?
Now I need to head out to work // the salt mines // my oar bench on the Trireme (there, does that make you happy, Sjon?). Ya, I work pretty hard, and that's genetic, too - my grandpa worked full time until he was 85, and part time into his 90's. Svenson's confusion results from my referring to the different jobs (work vs. book) using the same old tired metaphors. Sorry, that's life.
Good Morning. Had a good day yesterday, so rewarded myself by going to the SVLUG meeting last night.The speaker was Darryl Ramm from VMWare. He did a fairly stock demo of VMWare, <snicker> although he used an install of Win2K RC3 as his host OS, and only demo'd Win2K in a VM, rather odd in front of a Linux group, don't you think?</snicker> I learned some very interesting tricks that I'll report on once I've had a chance to verify that they do what I think I understood he was saying. Now for some email...
Hello Brian, I have just installed VNC on our servers and solved the KVN switch problem - thanks for the tip. One thing: you say "run NT headless". Can I run NT4 without a keyboard and mouse? That would clean up the bench something wonderful. I catch your site daily, having filtered through from Dr Pournelle. Many thanks for your words. Regards, Peter Smith
You're welcome. Given how easy VNC was to set up, I am kicking myself for not exploring it sooner, as I have heard people talking/writing about it for the last year or more... Ah, well. Full headless should be NP, you'll want to set the BIOS to not hink when there's no keyboard detected (or leave the KVM switch in place, which mocks the hardware for a number of systems). Test, of course. Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad to have you visiting.
On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 02:21:32PM -0700, Bowman, Dan wrote: Yeah, I see the newspaper metaphor on the front page. I just wasn't sure how your product placement was directed. ...and it doesn't matter much when someone (like in the next office over from me) wants it 'just so'. ...but, for the general population, Jakob's and that place's use of the "Yahoo Metaphor" get's back to using what people are used to using. I'll have to remember which vendor's site I dropped into the other day and just turned around and walked out after a few minutes. They re-invented a wheel and I didn't have the time to learn to drive it; I called my rep and placed the order. Dan
OK. I am having a thought, but I can't work it now or for the next few days. It got side-burnered by some other projects. Forwarded to me at work to think about... Thanks.
On Mon, Oct 02, 2000 at 08:35:27PM -0400, [email protected] wrote: Brian; Please get your Magnetic page open. I work with Electromechanical Relays (used in the rail industry). I design these beasts using only the "Ampre-Turn" Law and the Inverse Square Law of magnetics. Yours; John D. Vogt
Hi, John - Thanks for dropping in. The content on the Magnetics and Services page is not likely to change much in the immediate future - there's nothing wonderful there like a plug in three numbers and out pops a transformer design that works with Java and Shockwave :). If you want to see what's there now, check http://www.etslan.com/Pages/magserv.html ETS used to be Electronic Transformer Service until about 1990, and we still build custom transformers of several breeds and species. It's one of those "send us your requirements and we'll tell you if we can do it" sort of business units. Glad to hear from you.
On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 03:28:06PM -0400, Pete Moore wrote: The new ETS home page is certainly a big improvement over the current version. Clean and orderly; looks good. Personally, I'm a Windows user for the most part, and so I use Front Page. I just wonder if by any chance you might have heard of something that strips out all the Office-specific HTML code from Office-generated files? Somebody pointed me at a Perl script called the Demoronizer, but it seems to be a Linux-only widget. Any ideas? Thanks, and thanks as well for your journal. You Daynoters are an important part of my day. Peter A. Moore
Hey, Peter- Thanks for visiting and for your kind words, both about the ETS revision, and about this joint. Demoronizer is a Perl script, and there's a Win32 version of Perl... go to www.perl.com, and follow the download link... I am not surprised, though I hadn't known it previously, but Demoronizer is found at John Walker's site, Fourmilab. *That* John Walker, of Autodesk fame, who also did the original Speak Freely code, and is sheltering himself and his dollars in Switzerland. Anyway, glad to hear from you. Hope the Perl pointer helps, but I know not more, 'cause I've never installed Perl on W32 systems, just use it in Linux. Take care, .brian
Good Morning and TGIF! Had a good day yesterday, wrote about 10 pages of material (well, I wrote 5 and the system wrote some scripts, we make a pretty good team together with Tom <g>. And in with that, I managed to work in a feature of VMWare that I had seen in passing, but never really explored. I installed eDesktop from scratch in the VM, and brought it up to running speed, made my modifications to the desktop colors, fonts and such for screenshots, then shut it down.
Before restarting VMWare, I opened the configuration editor for the eDesktop VM, and changed the mode of the disks from Persistent to Undoable (there is a third mode, Nonpersistent, which will be clear in a moment). Now, from the moment that I restart the VM, until I shut it down, writes are not made to the actual disk, but to a journal file in the Host OS (Win2K in this case), and reads happen from either the disk, or the journal file, as appropriate. At the end of the session, when powering down the VM, a dialog box pops up, asking me if I want to Commit or Discard the changes. My, isn't this handy?
I spent a couple of hours mucking about in the system, figuring out how to best secure the OpenLinux install. I took notes, ran and printed script files and generally messed things about. Once I was happy that I had the correct sequence and set of actions to get from a clean install state to a secured box, I shut down the box, discarded all the changes, and started over again, from the clean install, taking final notes and confirming that my two hours of securing can be done in 4 pages of text, which boils down to four edited files and a set of check boxes in a dialog, then restart the system by switching to runlevel 1, then back to 5 (the equivalent of switching to DOS mode, then back, on a Windows box). Why? It's a lot faster than a real, full reboot (warm or cold). Now we've got a secure base installation of eDesktop. Whoo-hooo! Of course, there's more to do, but it's safe to connect to the Internet in the condition it's in now. Now quit again, and Commit the changes.
Nonpersistent disks also have their uses -- imagine using this feature to lock down an install for classroom or demo purposes. Oh, and if the machine is set up with virtual disks, then you can back up the virtual disk files to a server, and use it for running many VM's. Cool!
Marcia's back is worse again, and she has a bad headcold/fever combination. However, she's not going in to work today, so should be able to rest well enough to make a dent in both problems (we hope). Now I have to finish getting ready for work myself. Svenson chimed in that where he is, they don't have galleys or oars in the salt mines, just treadmills. I replied that treadmill was a noun: a machine for grinding feet. On that note, I am outta here. See ya later.
Howdy. I was awake at 5:20 this morning, but bright enough even at that early hour to roll over and go back to sleep. Now here we are, 3+ hours later, sucking on the first cup of caffeine and waiting for the inner fires to stoke up... heh.
DVD Players and computers: an alternative viewpoint. I don't want to watch DVD movies on my computer. Really, I don't, at all, ever. I had a Creative DVD player here in Grinch with a hardware board that interrupted the video path. In Windows, I was able to play DVDs. But between the DVD board and the KVM switch, I was suffering from video signal attenuation. It worked great if I took one device or the other out of the path. So out went the DVD board - I used the thing as a CDROM drive. That drive finally died and I put in a 52X SEA drive that just plain flies, for 32 bucks. For DVD movies? We bought a DVD player - ties into the stereo for the super sound, plus plays all our music discs, which is a good thing since the old CDplayer was dying slowly. I guess that's been my only real wonder about the DeCSS thing. Why watch movies on the computer? Isn't that what the TV is for? Jerry's DVD travails of last night (Friday 10/6/2000) brought this on. I regard DVD on the computer as a quirk - what I want is DVD-RAM, a 5+ Gig writeable backup device for very little $ and a long archival life. Is that asking too much?
There's some more email to take care of. First, John Doucette on the "drugs in the dot-com" topic...
Hi Brian I have seen abuse at all social levels. From the Dot com crowd, they want to play as hard as they work, and can afford financially to indulge themselves. At the other end I have seen manual laborers who start their day with a joint cause they don't care to face reality while straight. A lot of dot com users are using due to peer pressure and wanting to be part of the latest fad in their social circles. The law and financial sectors have seen the same thing in the past with everything from drugs, fancy drinks to imported water. I never face down the few friends I still have who like to indulge, when they chose to indulge in their choice of narcotic. If they were junkies I would, but they are casual recreational users who enjoy a drag or snort the way I enjoy a cold beer or two once in a blue moon. [...] As I grow as a person I find reality for me is the best drug of all. Tears, sorrow, joy and laughter all give me more than any six pack ever gave me. That's my two cents worth on the subject. John
John - You mention peer pressure. So much of the hot business stuff is a young person's game, where the influence of your peers to doing stupid things is so much more ... persuasive. While I also don't confront people about their personal choices and lives, I do, sometimes, let them know a bit about what I went through to get to where and who I am today, and offer to be there for them if they find themselves spinning out of control. If it were family, it would be different, of course. The good news is that all that behaviour and habituation *CAN BE BEAT*! I know, I've done so. Hell, I even quit smoking cigarettes a little more than 18 months ago, and that was the toughest substance to stop of any of them. Don't try and take my caffeine from me though, I'll have to hurt somebody.
On Sat, Oct 07, 2000 at 02:03:45PM +0800, Peter wrote: Hi, I am unable to chown files in /mnt/window/ my W98 partition as well as in /mnt/dos/ even as root. If I try an error message shows: "Operation not permitted (1)" Why is that and how can it be changed? Regards Peter
That's because the VFAT and DOS file systems don't provide for ownership information, at all. You can't get there from here. If you copy from a linux partition to the win/dos partition, you should get the "Trying to save ownership: Operation not permitted" as well. A little experiment should prove instructive. If the line in /etc/fstab for your Windows partition includes the "user" option, then cd to the /mnt/win (or wherever) directory and use ls -al. This shows that all the files are owned by user.group root.root, right? Now umount the partition, and remount it as *peter* (or whatever your normal login name is) For this to be possible, the fstab has to say something like: /dev/hdc1 /mnt/win vfat user,exec,conv=binary 0 0 It's the user option that allows you to do this, so ------------ [peter@machine peter]$ ls -al /mnt/win * * * drwxr-xr-x 34 root root 4096 Mar 26 2000 Program Files/ * * * [peter@machine peter]$ umount /mnt/win [peter@machine peter]$ mount /mnt/win # now mounted by user peter [peter@machine peter]$ ls -al /mnt/win * * * drwxr-xr-x 34 peter peter 4096 Mar 26 2000 Program Files/ * * * ---------------- This shows that the owner.group info is artificially put in, drawn from the info of the user that mounts the partition. Sorry there isn't better news.
Now, I have a chapter to edit from Tom, and a chapter to finish and send to Tom for editing. Sounds like a busy day, and it is. Take care. I might return later if something interesting pops up.
19:55 - Well, nothing particularly interesting, but I try to keep my hand in. Went to my grandmother's house and made us supper. Marcia ended up staying home, out of a strong desire not to give my g'mom the cold/flu she (Marcia) has. Now I am back, and remembering, I saw something about a guy who skied all the way down Everest... where was that, oh, yeah, Slashdot had it, the Ski Everest 2000 site. Oh, and very, very cool. The Ig Nobel prizes are out. Hemos likes the levitating frog, but my favorite is the Brit sailors who shout "Bang" in place of live firing exercises. Are you surprised, Bob? Definitely check out the Ig's.
Now, I am definitely whipped. Chapter 1 is back in Tom's hands and likely to head out to IDG tomorrow, and I also gave him my first draft of 19 to play with. I know I am making him work too hard <g>, but then it's a team effort. Tag, it's your turn, Landon. On that note, I'll call it a night. See y'all tomorrow.
Hi. I slept a long, long time. Woke at 5, mumbled something similar to "No way!" (possibly also incorporating a word that begins with 'f'), rolled over and went back to sleep. Got up sometime just after 9:30, and the coffee is now starting to kick in. Been surfing about and generally wasting time. Don't do that much these days, more's the pity (hey, Chris, is that acceptable use of the apostrophe?
By the way, Bob's back, with trip report in hand. Have a gander.
Here's a funny to check out - a UN organization page with a "Linux plows Microsoft under" animated GIF at the top. <g> The site is actually for the Sustainable Development Networking Programme. An interesting site to spelunk about, too.
The events for today are uncertain - it would be good for me to give the computer a bit of a rest, but ... We'll see, I suppose. In the meantime, take care.
