If some­thing starts going right, some­thing else has to break. At least, that’s how it seems at the minute — as soon as one PC starts behav­ing, another falls to a most mis­er­able state of exis­tence. It’s all about the dis­tri­b­u­tion of “lucky points”, a bril­liant friend remarked…

My SuSE desk­top isn’t boot­ing into X (or, is, but the pro­ceeds to become unus­able… go fig­ure — the num­lock key still works, and it’s fine in run­level 3, but as soon as X starts, out go the net­work inter­faces and display!) — which wouldn’t be a prob­lem on any nor­mal sys­tem, but I’m fairly sure I’ve whinged in the past about how stu­pidly stu­pid SuSE is when it comes to doing things in any stan­dard way… even binary stuff like NVidia’s Linux dri­vers it man­ages to man­gle, which is the prob­lem here — I can’t unin­stall them, and I can’t rein­stall them, because SuSE appar­ently requires spe­cial treat­ment. Sort of. The NVidia guide says you can man­u­ally install it but it won’t han­dle ker­nel upgrades on its own (e.g. you’ll have to rein­stall the dri­vers every time, like on all other distros!) — except, this prob­lem was caused by a ker­nel upgrade and SuSE’s fail­ure to deal with it on its own, and now I’m up the prover­bial creek because man­ual inter­ven­tion isn’t an option (or rather, it’d be faster just to rein­stall another oper­at­ing sys­tem, or something.)

There is good news, though (not that this has substantial/any impact on the rest of the world — it’s good for me, and this web­site is all about my sta­tus as a “cheap exhi­bi­tion­ist”! — plus the fact that you’re read­ing this implies that you’re either bored enough to be inter­ested, or objec­tively inter­ested… but I digress even more!).

I’ve thrown Fedora from the third floor of this house (I love being able to do that!!), and replaced it with FreeBSD (I could say it’s all Dale’s fault — yes, click the link, he’s run­ning his blog on a snazzy new domain!), but that’s hardly true… hav­ing said that, his good reports cer­tainly played a part in that deci­sion). It’s not going to han­dle rout­ing any­more, but will be prox­y­ing as soon as I get that ade­quately setup, if only for the pur­pose of ad block­ing (and pos­si­bly band­width — I’ve used a ridicu­lous amount thus far this month, to the point that I’ll actu­ally be going over the 10GB soft-limit if things con­tinue this way… meh! Shouldn’t be a big issue.). Its pri­mary func­tion is as a Samba server, func­tion­ing as a domain con­troller and file/print server. It’ll also be han­dling scan­ning, although that’s com­pletely sep­a­rate from Samba functionality.

The rout­ing aspect of things is now being han­dled by a D-Link DI-624 wire­less router, which does 802.11g, and has an inbuilt BPA client (which, inci­den­tally, sucks. Work­ing on that prob­lem, too — it seems as though dif­fer­ent firmware might make the world a bet­ter place, but exactly which firmware remains to be seen…) — it’s also got 4 wired ports, only two of which are in use — one uplinked to the main switch, the other directly into the server.

FreeBSD is fun, but it took me a while to fig­ure out how to get root via remote access. There’s some­thing mildly depress­ing yet strangely funny about jump­ing up and down shout­ing “g0t r00t!!!” in ref­er­ence to a com­puter you have phys­i­cal access to, but I did, nonethe­less :-P Shrug, it wasn’t a prob­lem I’d had before… learn­ing experience? ;-)

I’m cur­rently hav­ing fun with ports, which is great, because I haven’t really got the fog­gi­est idea if I’m doing this right. I feel like I should have updated the ports index when I first installed, because I know for a fact some of the stuff listed here is old­ish… but whether that’s for secu­rity rea­sons or what­ever else I hon­estly couldn’t say. It mat­ters less now, because I’m not using this thing as a directly-Internet con­nected device, which is good. I con­tem­plated stick­ing one inter­face of it onto a DMZ, but fig­ured that prob­a­bly wasn’t be best of ideas, see­ing I’m the one respon­si­ble for patch­ing and oth­er­wise DoingStuff™ with the sys­tem… shrug!

Samba’s just been com­piled and installed, and I’m grab­bing vim before attempt­ing any­thing fur­ther, sim­ply because I find myself lost with­out being able to type “vim file­name” and hav­ing it DO some­thing, instead of just giv­ing me errors. I’m a long long way from being any kind of vim guru, and it’s overkill con­sid­er­ing how I use it (open file, press Insert to edit, press escape, :wq), but using “edit” just doesn’t feel right. As soon as that’s done com­pil­ing (it’s still down­load­ing patches painfully slowly from some US server — is there any way to change the source of down­load for ports??), I’ll start get­ting Samba up and run­ning, which involves installing OpenL­DAP, set­ting up users and stuff in there, then fig­ur­ing out how to make Samba a nice happy domain con­troller, point­ing Win­dows clients to it, set­ting up login scripts to make the clients mount dri­ves nicely, and then fix my other SuSE desk­top (haha, don’t think it’ll stay SuSE much longer… sug­ges­tions any­one? :)) with a view to get­ting it to authen­ti­cate users with the domain con­troller (pre­sum­ably using… some Linux thing… Ker­beros? Shrug. I’ve got no idea what I’m talk­ing about, as should be plainly clear to any­one who does by now!). Fol­low­ing that, I get to setup Squid, and then AMP which’ll be fun. And then an email server. I’ve dis­cov­ered I can send out­bound mes­sages on my own SMTP server with­out any prob­lems (cue applause), but I don’t know if Tel­stra is stu­pid by default with inbound MTA stuff… I’m sure if it doesn’t work you’ll read all about how ter­ri­ble they are here as I jump up and down and cry about it, before call­ing Tech­ni­cal Sup­port, lis­ten­ing to their groooovy hold music (seri­ously, it’s great — no crappy “Your call is impor­tant to us” rub­bish, just cool jazz… at least, it was last night. I nearly plugged my phone into the new amp to hear it bet­ter, coz the speak­er­phone wasn’t doing it jus­tice!), and then resolv­ing the whole thing with a few mouse clicks.

Oh, and I would take pho­tos, but there isn’t really any­thing that looks new and inter­est­ing that I haven’t posted already, so… I won’t yet :P That means don’t ask for less talk and more pic­tures, Steve :P