Day 2
Dammit, this is like detoxing off horse tranquillizers. I used to think I was a Linux geek before this little jaunt, but hell's teeth, there's nothing like a bit of total immersion to dump you way out of your comfort zone, with the weather closing in, and no protection from the elements.
As my buddhist meditation teacher keeps saying, difficult circumstances should be viewed with happiness, as they offer us a chance to practice patience. By that measure, today was especially happy.
Got to work, and at least got connected to the network and got reading my email in fairly short order. Then fired up Firefox and tried to do a bit of surfing, but it started leaking all over the place and the machine rapidly hit its memory ceiling, resulting in karma-destroying clunkiness. A bit of research on the web suggested that Swiftfox (customised, optimised builds of FF on a per-platform basis) might help with these memory issues a bit. Download Swiftfox. Unpack it into my apps directory, and give it a run. All seems to be well, so I uninstall Firefox, update the system tray to point at Swiftfox, and off we go. A little later, while trying to get Google Reader to wake up and smell the coffee, I cleared my cache and cookies. And pretty much everything else too, apparently; particularly, passwords. Swiftfox then threw a crazy wobbly as it tried to connect to our proxy server. Authentication kept failing, resulting in pop-ups asking me for my user/pass every few minutes. Eventually I got fed up and set Swiftfox to point back at the local NTLMAPS proxy. Great. Now I'm getting two boxes popping as soon as I fire the program up, one asking me to auth against our network proxy server, and the other asking me to auth against the local proxy server, which is, unfortunately, impossible. In addition, Swiftfox appears to hang behind these windows, freezing up the rest of the UI in the process. Argh. A reboot and some hair pulling later gets me onto my boss's WiFi network, which thank god is unmanaged and has a broadband connection to the internet plugged into it. I uninstall Swiftfox and reinstall Firefox. Congratulations! You've just wasted half a day!
However, all is still not well with the Firefox installation, which now seems to have caught a milder version (chicken as opposed to small, if you wish) of the pox that affected its thoroughbred sibling. New tabs open clunkily and slowly; the browser often hangs for minutes on end while loading pages; much memory is being monopolised, more even than before. It's not quite dead, just so slow and erratic as to be virtually unusable. I have narrowed it down to a problem with the proxy access - away from work, with a direct connection to the net, it behaves far better. Sigh.
In further fun, I sat down with a determined set to my mind and tried to fix the samba issues. First and foremost, I discovered that my sausage-fingered mangling of smb.conf had resulted in the machine being plonked in a default workgroup, with no access permissions at all. Fixing my error, and reloading samba, did a bizarre thing; it ate the first few lines of my smb.conf. Removing the permissions. Putting me back in the default workgroup. Swine thing! Editing smb.conf again duplicated the error exactly, so it's clearly a bug. Poo sticks. Eventually, the web (oh bless thee, electrons from afar) directed me to a page where some bright spark explained a rather different way of tackling the problem, leaving user-level authentication intact, but bamboozling the server into directing all unknown users to the "nobody" user, which is mercifully passwordless and hence, in a slightly convoluted (but perfectly functional) way, allows everyone else on the network access to my shares. I test it from a Windows machine next door. It works. I practically do a jig.
In more samba experiments, I tried to get the other half of the file-sharing dealio working, namely, me seeing the other shares on the network. Initially, this crashed and burned with a pretty orange flame. I could browse the "samba network" from my "remote places" on the KDE taskbar, I could even see the various workgroups and machines. Trying to open a particular machine to see the shares though, failed with either a time out or a permission-denied. Every now and then I would get asked for my user/pass (for the Windows domain) and after supplying it, would still be politely told not to let the door hit my ass on my way out. Eventually I found a handy setting in the share config part of the KDE control panel that let me specify a common user/pass for accessing Windows shares. Plugged in my details, and voila, we're good to go. Access to the network is mine! Ah but wait, there's more. First of all, there is a minor niggle in that the user/pass I use to access the cluster computer in my office (it's also a Linux box, or boxes, rather) is different to my domain pair. This, along with the now-automated means of logging in to all the other shares on the network, means I can't get onto that box, which is pretty important for backups and suchlike. Bah, maybe I can fix this later with NFS or something. The next thing that happens is straight out of the bizarro-files. After fiddling with the samba server as described above, I pop on to "remote places" again, only to find that half of the workgroups are now AWOL. Refreshing the page seems to bring up random ones, but never the whole list, and never the one or two that contain virtually all the machines on the network. I'm confused; will have to investigate more tomorrow.
Luckily the day ended on a good note - plugged in my D50, which was automatically recognised as a digital camera and plonked on my desktop. A simple double click got me into the memory card and a quick drag and drop sorted out storage of photos. digiKam already knows what directory to look in for my pictures, and sorts out and displays the new ones just fine. Rotate a couple, skim through on the slide show dumping the bad ones (I'm a dreadful photographer, so an easy delete-from-preview shortcut is essential - clever digiKam just uses the delete button, like everyone else), and I'm pretty much done. A total breeze.
Ok, that's it. Turning the computer off now.
As my buddhist meditation teacher keeps saying, difficult circumstances should be viewed with happiness, as they offer us a chance to practice patience. By that measure, today was especially happy.
Got to work, and at least got connected to the network and got reading my email in fairly short order. Then fired up Firefox and tried to do a bit of surfing, but it started leaking all over the place and the machine rapidly hit its memory ceiling, resulting in karma-destroying clunkiness. A bit of research on the web suggested that Swiftfox (customised, optimised builds of FF on a per-platform basis) might help with these memory issues a bit. Download Swiftfox. Unpack it into my apps directory, and give it a run. All seems to be well, so I uninstall Firefox, update the system tray to point at Swiftfox, and off we go. A little later, while trying to get Google Reader to wake up and smell the coffee, I cleared my cache and cookies. And pretty much everything else too, apparently; particularly, passwords. Swiftfox then threw a crazy wobbly as it tried to connect to our proxy server. Authentication kept failing, resulting in pop-ups asking me for my user/pass every few minutes. Eventually I got fed up and set Swiftfox to point back at the local NTLMAPS proxy. Great. Now I'm getting two boxes popping as soon as I fire the program up, one asking me to auth against our network proxy server, and the other asking me to auth against the local proxy server, which is, unfortunately, impossible. In addition, Swiftfox appears to hang behind these windows, freezing up the rest of the UI in the process. Argh. A reboot and some hair pulling later gets me onto my boss's WiFi network, which thank god is unmanaged and has a broadband connection to the internet plugged into it. I uninstall Swiftfox and reinstall Firefox. Congratulations! You've just wasted half a day!
However, all is still not well with the Firefox installation, which now seems to have caught a milder version (chicken as opposed to small, if you wish) of the pox that affected its thoroughbred sibling. New tabs open clunkily and slowly; the browser often hangs for minutes on end while loading pages; much memory is being monopolised, more even than before. It's not quite dead, just so slow and erratic as to be virtually unusable. I have narrowed it down to a problem with the proxy access - away from work, with a direct connection to the net, it behaves far better. Sigh.
In further fun, I sat down with a determined set to my mind and tried to fix the samba issues. First and foremost, I discovered that my sausage-fingered mangling of smb.conf had resulted in the machine being plonked in a default workgroup, with no access permissions at all. Fixing my error, and reloading samba, did a bizarre thing; it ate the first few lines of my smb.conf. Removing the permissions. Putting me back in the default workgroup. Swine thing! Editing smb.conf again duplicated the error exactly, so it's clearly a bug. Poo sticks. Eventually, the web (oh bless thee, electrons from afar) directed me to a page where some bright spark explained a rather different way of tackling the problem, leaving user-level authentication intact, but bamboozling the server into directing all unknown users to the "nobody" user, which is mercifully passwordless and hence, in a slightly convoluted (but perfectly functional) way, allows everyone else on the network access to my shares. I test it from a Windows machine next door. It works. I practically do a jig.
In more samba experiments, I tried to get the other half of the file-sharing dealio working, namely, me seeing the other shares on the network. Initially, this crashed and burned with a pretty orange flame. I could browse the "samba network" from my "remote places" on the KDE taskbar, I could even see the various workgroups and machines. Trying to open a particular machine to see the shares though, failed with either a time out or a permission-denied. Every now and then I would get asked for my user/pass (for the Windows domain) and after supplying it, would still be politely told not to let the door hit my ass on my way out. Eventually I found a handy setting in the share config part of the KDE control panel that let me specify a common user/pass for accessing Windows shares. Plugged in my details, and voila, we're good to go. Access to the network is mine! Ah but wait, there's more. First of all, there is a minor niggle in that the user/pass I use to access the cluster computer in my office (it's also a Linux box, or boxes, rather) is different to my domain pair. This, along with the now-automated means of logging in to all the other shares on the network, means I can't get onto that box, which is pretty important for backups and suchlike. Bah, maybe I can fix this later with NFS or something. The next thing that happens is straight out of the bizarro-files. After fiddling with the samba server as described above, I pop on to "remote places" again, only to find that half of the workgroups are now AWOL. Refreshing the page seems to bring up random ones, but never the whole list, and never the one or two that contain virtually all the machines on the network. I'm confused; will have to investigate more tomorrow.
Luckily the day ended on a good note - plugged in my D50, which was automatically recognised as a digital camera and plonked on my desktop. A simple double click got me into the memory card and a quick drag and drop sorted out storage of photos. digiKam already knows what directory to look in for my pictures, and sorts out and displays the new ones just fine. Rotate a couple, skim through on the slide show dumping the bad ones (I'm a dreadful photographer, so an easy delete-from-preview shortcut is essential - clever digiKam just uses the delete button, like everyone else), and I'm pretty much done. A total breeze.
Ok, that's it. Turning the computer off now.
posted by kittychunk at
8:59 AM
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