Musical chairs
05 Feb 2005If 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