14 Jan 2002 jbowman   » (Journeyer)

Hm. 9 months since last diary entry. Ah well, lets do some updates then:

Birthday: Was fun. Nice, quiet. Just what I wanted. Holidays: Sucked. Hardcore. New Rule for Divorced Parents: Don't get together on Christmas for dinner when you hate each other. It ruins the entire evening, even if you're not yelling at each other.

Ethical dilemma - Solved.

Monitor - Purchased (and very nice, too :). My actual problem turned out to be the port on the video card (which was weird, because I had the problem on my other machine with a different card, but then it magically vanished afterwards...). Oh well. Now I have a nice 17" TFT instead, and my 21" sits and gathers dust. At some point, I'll get dual-monitor support on my video card...

Wacky Hard Drive problems: Bad cable (RedHat's support staff actually thanked me for providing them with more symptom data for this)

SSH: Openssh is so much groovier... The 'official' SSH folks finally got around to releasing Source RPMS though. I'd missed this little feature since I moved to openssh, but they apparently decided to break the ssh1 support by renaming the ssh2/3 packages back to the "ssh" package name. *sigh* Earth to SSH folks! If the packages are named the same, you can't install them alongside each other cleanly! Ah well.

Debian - libranet sucked. Progeny was cool, and I had it running on my old internet gateway box. Sad to hear the news that Progeny closed its doors though. It was the closest to a 'usable' Debian system I've had in a while.

Mud - Ah, my mud. So fun! We're about at the beta-testing stage now, which is only 3 months or so later than I had originally hoped. Real, paid work (y'know, the kind that takes care of rent? :) has been occupying most of the coding team for a while now, so things are a bit sluggish.

The Job - Ah, the job. What can I say about the job? Too much and too little. It's an excellent series starring Denis Leary. :)

Seriously though, I've managed to get a better handle on job stress in the past year, so I ultimately worry less about work. After dealing with clients needing security work these past couple of weeks, it makes me wonder whether the whole "Microsoft Admin Security Mentality" that I've griped about in the past isn't indicative of a more wide-spread "Incompetent Admin Mentality". Quoth the magic eight ball: My Sources Say Yes.

Spinweb: Spinweb started out as such a neat idea, and has since gone off into some rather oddball waters. We had it setup to run at work from the secure webserver via a cgi script, but after we put a new user shell server in place a couple of months ago it broke the web-based spinweb system since it was no longer running on the same system as the shell server.

The solution? Whack spinweb with a mallet until it works with McFeely. It was actually pretty fun to do, as it gave me some insights into distributed network architecture and how to work with it from a programming standpoint.

RedHat: 7.2 came out, and it's so smooth and slick it's amazing. We're finally using it for kickstarts here at work, and so far things have been running quite smoothly.

["I'm really missin' it in so many ways, I anticipate us making out..."]

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