Something tells me I'm going to be phasing out this Linux journal in favor of posting any and all news on the main-page blog.
24 June 2002I got myself into another mess last week. The starting point was when a new version of apache came out that fixed a recent security bug. I decided, logically enough, to upgrade the version of apache on my web server from 1.3.24 to 1.3.26. (I decided that upgrading to one of the 2.x versions looked daunting enough that I'd put off that upgrade until I can read up on how to do it properly.)
The first mistake I made was really a failure over the long term to record how I've configured apache in the past. I have apache running with ssl and php, but I didn't have any record of how I had cooked up this combination, which would make upgrading tricky. The only record of apache configuration that I had included only --enable-module=so (and I wasn't even sure why, at this point), and that was several builds ago, before I added the ssl and php features to my web site.
The second mistake I made was upgrading more than one software package at once. I thought while I was at it that I'd make sure I have the newest versions of PHP and OpenSSL (also, I thought I needed the source for these packages in order to connect them up with apache).
The third mistake I made was not being proficient enough with PHP to notice the changes to the language in the newest PHP. Variables that once were referred to as $PHP_AUTH_PASSWORD or $FOO were now encompassed in so-called "super globals" $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PASSWORD'] and $_POST['FOO'].
Things seem to be working okay now, finally.
9 May 2002From what I've heard about Red Hat 7.3 so far, I'm not overly eager to upgrade to it from 7.2. On the other hand, my server could probably use an upgrade from Slackware 7.0 to 8.0. I just discovered Red Hat's up2date tool the other day; it's really handy. And I should really, really back up my boxes. For the desktop I should be able to use a CD-RW or to to back up; for the server, I hope some Zip 250s will suffice. After those more urgent items are done, I'd like to:
In a couple of days, I'll be taking my desktop PC on a field trip... to a VPN-a-thon in northern Virginia.
23 April 2002I've been trying out xtremelearning.com's web-based training on the topic of linux administration.I cannot recommend this training. It contains sentences like, "The Xfree86 Web server is designed to provide broad support for common hardware in the Intel x86 computer environment and, in more recent versions, for other platforms." And lapses like this (as well as software bugs) appear with frustrating regularity.
12 March 2002More problems, more fixes. Yesterday I had problems where I couldn't use vi as a regular user, my mail wasn't coming through, and, after I rebooted (this is after upgrading OpenSSH), I couldn't log in via ssh anymore. Turns out there were two problems. One was that when I configured the new OpenSSH, I had to ./configure --with-md5-hash. The other problem was that I wasn't watching my hard disk usage, and it got full. That explained why qmail wouldn't accept new mail and why vi wouldn't give me a fresh buffer. So all's better now. Until the next time I break things. :)
Ever since I joined the Bugtraq and Incidents mailing lists at securityfocus.com, I've been hyper-aware of every little new vulnerability. Last week, it was openssh. This week, it's zlib. Plus, I'm taking a graduate course on Enterprise Security and Privacy *and* following the LinuxChix security lessons (as well as putting them on the web). I'm on the SANS and CERT lists, too, though they're much lower-traffic. Want to send me encrypted communication? Here's my PGP public key.
In local news, DC LinuxChix now has a homepage.
Secure password management databases are a Good Thing.
26 February 2002My machine is fixed. I never did find out what the problem was, but I still suspect a bad hard drive. I haven't done forensics on it yet, though. I don't know when I'll get the time to do that. I just installed RedHat 7.2 over the old RedHat 7.0 and it works just fine now. Yea!
Now that I have a working desktop machine again, I've started the kernel hacking course at linuxchix.org. So far I've configured and compiled the 2.4.18-pre7 kernel, and it seems to boot okay, although I have no idea whether some of the warning and error messages that appear are serious. Do you want to look at my 2.4.18-pre7 dmesg output?
Sometime soon I should make the effort to figure out how to grab pictures from my digital camera in linux, now that I have an up-to-date-enough kernel to support USB decently. Maybe now that I'm not out of town so much (first Hawai'i, then Pittsburgh, then Phoenix) I'll have more time to play with my boxes. Another thing I'd like to do is set up a library database with a web interface for Rob's books. I see PHP/mySQL coming in handy there.
Coordination of the DC Linuxchix group is going well so far. I set up a mailing list for us recently and registered us with Apress and O'Reilly. I'd like to find ways to recruit more chix. Something to think about.
25 January 2002
Well, I messed up my machine, once again. I had just transferred my digital pictures from my camera to my desktop PC. I opened gimp, but it wasn't responding, and then my whole desktop froze. Now, I get init: error while loading shared libraries: /lib/libc.so.6: cannot read file
data: Input/output error when I try to boot RedHat. Windows still works fine, or at least as fine as it usually does. I just finished downloading the RedHat 7.2 CD images, so I'll try burning them and booting from them and seeing where I can go from there. Why do I keep screwing up my computers?!
Wow -- I answered someone's question on the Linuxchix Techtalk list correctly! Yea! The question was about a procmail recipe using regular expressions and $MATCH. Yea! Go me!
3 January 2002My big Linux issue lately has been getting my new digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 775, working with Linux. It has a USB interface, but according to the Linux USB Project, my 2.2.16 kernel will need to be upgraded to at least 2.2.18, or preferably 2.4, to support a USB device. So I downloaded the 2.4.16 kernel source, configured it, compiled it, and added the image to my LILO configuration. I booted with that image, and I got a bunch of errors on bootup about initializing things like my ethernet interface and my CD-ROM and CD-RW drives. :( So now I'm trying to figure out whether that's to be expected or whether I did something wrong.
19 December 2001Well, I inquired about the chances of my switching my desktop PC at work to Linux. To sum up the answer: not a chance. The standard is the status quo, and there's no questioning the status quo.
I switched ICQ clones from GnomeICU to Licq. When I was using GnomeICU, I noticed that sometimes a large fraction of my messages never got through to their recipients. So far Licq seems to be working okay, but it's really too early for me to say anything definitive about it.
4 December 2001I was having some DNS problems yesterday, which was annoying because e-mail to me must have been bouncing all over the place. I think I fixed the problem, at least for now, by deleting the MX record for my domain. I'll figure out what I should really do later. Maybe that'll be running my own DNS server or something.
Fortunately for me (I think...), Comcast came to an agreement with Excite @Home, so I won't be losing my cable modem connectivity from home anytime soon. Yay!
I'm going to have to try out Evolution sometime soon. I think it's the single biggest application type missing from the Linux desktop and when you put it together with Ximian Connector, we're going to see some exciting market expansion for Linux desktops. Where I work, our branch requires us to have MS Exchange connectivity for scheduling meetings and such. Now, there's some possibility that I could use something other than Windows on my desktop at work, which would be way cool. (In an -- ahem -- unrelated note, I just received three copies of the latest e-mail virus that's going around in my Outlook mail.)
30 November 2001The computers, red and blue, have moved to their new home and are doing well. The transition was surprisingly smooth.
I had been using Pronto! as my MTA, but yesterday I switched to mutt, with fetchmail and procmail, of course. So far, I like it quite a bit. My problems with Pronto!:
The only real linux-specific news I have to report is that I installed the pure-ftpd FTP server a week or so ago. It went fairly smoothly. I want it to run under tcpserver, but I'm not sure I set it up right (I tried to do it qmail-style). Stand-alone is good enough for now.
I have other non-linux-specific stuff, though. My computers will be moving to their new home, and new IP address, this weekend. I finally caved in and ordered a couple of UPSs the other day. I have yet to see whether the power outages at my new house will be as frequent as those at my old apartment (3 miles away). Anyway, I'm sure *some* outages will inevitably occur, and I want to protect my babies from them. I figure two SmartUPS 700's should give each of them between fifteen and thirty minutes of back-up power.
30 July 2001Thanks to a manual (finally) sent by the Pogo Linux folks, I have discovered linuxconf. And one of these days I'm going to check out webmin, I swear. You'd almost think running linux was easy!
One thing I'd love to be able to do is create another set of partitions on my newer computer (with the big hard drive) just for experimenting with other operating systems. So I could play with other operating systems and also practice installing them. Things like other Linux flavors, various types of BSD, BeOS.... I have a ways to go before I can do that, though: I'll have to learn more about partitioning, about the various OS's themselves, about how LILO works more in depth, about burning ISO images.... I doubt I'll have time to learn this stuff in the summer. I just looked down at the other, past entries in the journal, and there's lots of stuff I wanted to learn a year ago that I haven't touched. I wish I could get paid to spend time figuring out how to do linux stuff. :)
13 June 2001Things are going well. I set up an e-mail server (running qmail) on my old box, and today I also made it a pop3 server. Having been subscribed to the qmail mailing list for a few weeks now, I've found that the qmail people are very strict, which is certainly a good thing when it comes to security, reliability, and standards-conformance.
I finally went to a meeting of the Columbia Area Linux Users Group the other night, and I found the group to be of quite healthy size.
The frequency of the power outages around here is getting to be annoying. (There have to have been three or four since the beginning of May, and they're all in perfectly nice weather, not electrical storms. My apartment office said a lot of times they're due to car accidents, but I have to wonder about the quality of a power distribution grid that's vulnerable to so many car accidents.) It's probably time to pony up the (unfortunately large amounts of) cash and invest in some uninterruptible power supplies.
22 February 2001So much has changed since my last entry... I've graduated from school, got a new job, moved to a new place, and got a new computer. The last item is a PogoLinux machine with a 1000MHz AMD K7 Thunderbird processor and other goodies. It's a dual-boot with Red Hat and W2K. It's quite fortunate that my new LAN router acts as a firewall, too, because I haven't quite figured out what's the equivalent of "inetd.conf" in RedHat.
In general, I think the idea of RPM is good. I have GnoRPM, which makes it fairly easy, or should. But anytime I use the "web find" option, it doesn't seem to be able to download the .rpm file. And almost every time I try to install something, it comes up with some conflicts and fails to install successfully. I've had far more success just downloading the source and compiling and installing from that.
6 December 2000Sure has been a while since my last entry, huh?
I'd heard that Mozilla's performance had improved since the last time I grabbed it (Milestone 15), so I got Milestone 18 today to try it out. The performance is somewhat better, but it makes Netscape 4.72 look blazingly fast by comparison (I'm not even going to try Netscape 6).
Recent accomplishments: I'm running an NTP daemon now, I've got a PHP-based virtual postcard generator on my web site, and I'm learning stuff about setting up my own domain from various HOWTOs.
There are some really sweet boxes at Pogo Linux. I'm going to get one once I graduate.
15 September 2000Whew, I'm running out of disk space, what with all the stuff I'm installing. Earlier today I tried installing aKtion, because I wanted to be able to see this AVI movie. It installed and stuff, but for some reason it didn't work -- it kept coming up with this error about Zv. I don't know what that was about. I couldn't find any other AVI players offhand, so I quit. :(
I just managed to install MySQL and PHP. It took me several hours, but I did it. In the process, I had to re-install Apache, since the default installation configuration doesn't enable the shared-object module. So, my little machine has been getting a workout today. I just wish my pace of learning could keep up with my pace of installing things (JDK, PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc., not to mention perl...).
On the web browser front: I did get Mozilla, hoping that it would be a less-memory-hogging app than Netscape. Man, was I wrong. It seems to take about five minutes to load up, and then an average of two minutes to load a simple web page. I also tried the StarOffice web browser, which seemed pretty decent, especially compared to Mozilla. My usual web browser now, though, is w3m, a text-based browser, kinda like lynx except that it does tables and colors and other fancy features, which helps quite a bit. I tried installing galeon, a graphical browser I've heard good things about, but it needed a certain file from the Mozilla source; even after I downloaded the *gargantuan* Mozilla source code, though, the galeon installer still wasn't able to find it. Oh well.
The other day I tried to figure out a way to set up a cron job that would automatically e-mail me the day's weather forecast in the morning. I know that this involves crontab and wget, which I did some experimenting with, but the one thing I couldn't figure out how to do was to extract normal-looking text from the html document that wget gets. I wonder whether lynx is the missing link, but I don't know how to use it in a way that would make it spit out the whole document, instead of giving it to me in pagefuls.
I found a neat little app today that sets up the LEDs on my keyboard to display my eth0 network traffic. Cool. Yet another thing I got today was slackUp, an automatic upgrader for slackware. Go slack!
Oh yeah, one more thing: I've decided I'm going to do my persuasive speech in SPCOM 100 on why people should use linux instead of windows. It should be fun, or something. I don't know what I'll be able to use for a visual aid there, though.
Well, it's been a fun evening with my computer, but I think that's enough for now. Over and out.
5 September 2000I figured out how to run the Apache server. I can't tell you any more, due to certain policies around here. ;)
Given a certain amount of motivation, I'm planning to make my box an NTP server, just since that seems to be the thing to do when I'm running a web server.
I'm trying to find a graphical, 'modern' web browser that's stable and doesn't eat my memory. I've already tried downloading Netscape Communicator 4.75 twice, and I'm trying again right now. Argh.
In other vaguely related news, I recently got the Java SDK for Linux (what a big download), and I'm learning Java (for probably the fifth time).
21 August 2000Number of items in last entry's list that I have since accomplished: 0 (I did register three domain names, but since I'm still highly clueless, I'm not counting Item the Fourth as completed).
My excuse is that I had to spend most of my time in Windows until recently, since Juno wanted me to. :(
I'm planning to set up apache (and supplementarily a NTP server) within the next few weeks. I finally fixed my GAIM client last night. That's all the news that's fit to print.
24 July 2000To do:
I don't have much to report, but I thought I should say something here, since it has been so long. I just downloaded the distributed.net client, I'll install it pretty soon. GAIM has been non-working for many weeks now, which is pretty annoying. I still haven't figured out the printing thing yet.
Things are progressing. I installed a lot of stuff, including the newest version of Enlightenment, WordPerfect, StarOffice, GAIM, and GnomeICU. I learned that Enlightenment is not feasible on a P166 at 32 bits per pixel. I took a few security precautions (but not enough to keep me from cringing at each login, lest I see another invader alert message). I'm participating in the Linux Demo Day sponsored by, among others, the PSU LUG. I got my zip drive working under Linux. And, as you may have noticed if you are ridiculously observant, this page is now in newest-at-the-top order. I've noticed that Netscape is tending to crash a lot on web page that have Java. But my two major pains-in-the-neck right now are (1) I can't get GnomeICU's sound to work; and (2) I haven't gotten my printer (HP672C) working yet, although, admittedly, I haven't spent a lot of time trying.
LILO: linux
Since the last entry, I got Linux to boot, installed a variety of things, tinkered around under Enlightenment, and then got this message upon login as root: Security check: INVADER ALERT
. I hadn't taken any security precautions, and I have no idea what the extent of the damage, if any, was. So I had to do a re-install, and now I'm back using Linux. I still have much to learn about security, though.
Never ending, still beginning.- John Dryden
So then.... I got the goods. I partitioned, I installed Slackware. And I can't boot it. This has been the case for several frustrating days now.
The superfluous, a very necessary thing.Voltaire, Le Mondain. Line 21.
I ordered Partition Magic, Slackware 7, and Linux: The Complete Reference. So, in about a week, I'll be back in the game. Yes, I already have Slackware (4) installed. Yes, I already have my partitions configured. Do you want to argue about that?
Shannon's Observation: Nothing is so frustrating as a bad situation that is beginning to improve.My other major frustration is finding out how to install things -- and where. I'm having some trouble finding the right balance between carefully preparing to do new kinds of things in Linux and jumping right in (and generally fscking things up). So far I've undertaken one installation -- of LICQ -- and probably my approach was excessively characterized by the latter method. I've got files all over the place, no idea how they fit together, a clearly inappropriate /tmp_icq directory with clearly too much non-temporary stuff in it, and a non-working LICQ program. You slashdotter types can laugh, but my point is that there's a lesson in there somewhere.
Try to find a seasoned Linux person to help you out.- X Windows chapter of Linux for Dummies
One of my two biggest frustrations now is managing my KDE desktop. Maybe I'm missing something, but it just doesn't seem intuitive. For instance, I go to the KDE Control Center, change the color of the desktop background, press OK, and one of two things happens: (a) nothing at all; or (b) some wallpaper appears. And I'm more than a little confused about why I can't select from the wallpaper menu under the Background configuration. I'll spare you my confusion about the virtual desktop for now... Arg. I'm sure I'll figure these things out in time. I'm not asking for help, though I won't turn it down if you've got something particularly helpful to say. The journey to Linux mastery is an individual one, and this is my way of contemplating where I am in it.
"If you continue running Windows, your system may become unstable." - blue screen of near-deathThis is the chronicle of my Linux escapades. I installed the Slackware 4.0 distribution of Linux a while back, via NFS. Ironically, my biggest problem those first several weeks was getting the networking configured correctly. As it turned out, my problem had to do with the IRQ and I/O address range of my NIC. But then my networking fizzled under Windows. After much tampering with my NIC's installation and configuration programs, I can finally have a network connection under Windows and Linux without re-configuring anything in between booting them (I've got a dual boot setup). Oddly, though, now whenever I start Windows, I get the message, "Invalid VxD dynamic link call from VREDIR(01) + 00005B12 to device '0487', service 4. Your Windows configuration is invalid. Run the Windows Setup program again to correct this problem. To continue running Windows press Y or ENTER. To quit the current program press N. If you continue running Windows, your system may become unstable. Do you want to continue?" :) I've decided to consider this message an aesthetic addition rather than a problem.