Computers: January 2004 Archives
That in Safari, when working in a form "textarea" HTML element, switching tabs resets the cursor back to the top of the textarea?
That is very annoying! Especially when one is trying to edit their template file in Movable Type...
-Andy.
I setup Movable Type on my machine just to mess around. But, my friends started asking me for accounts (and then their friends), and this whole thing is starting to take off. Mark has an article up that has like over 5 comments! Wow!
Does this mean that I have to be a responsible admin-type-guy now?
-Andy.
So (can I over-use that word any more?), without getting into too much detail, yesterday was spent trying to get some friends setup with Dreamweaver MX, so that they could publish content to Mike and Kevin's Linux box. This particular Linux box happens to be running Debian, thanks to the influence of "a certain Guju"...
Normally, I can deal with Linux in just about any flavor, but Debian is different enough to be giving me fits. After wasting a good chunk of yesterday fighting various Dreamweaver/SSH/ftp/NAT/tunneling issues, I decided that I would like to leave all of that in the dust by configuring the Linux box to act as a VPN server for the Windows VPN (PPP over L2TP) client.
Sounds simple enough, right?
Well, it took all day today, but it finally looks like I will have a kernel that both:
- Has the pre-requesite FreeS/WAN support in the kernel, and
- compiles to completion, without error.
Ug. So this means that I spent a lot of time fighting to get all of the requisite sources and packages on the box. And then fought trying to understand Debian's unique way of compiling the kernel (make-kpkg). And then, watched the compile fail in the FreeS/WAN "ipsec_init.c" code.
Much, much, much use of Google later, I decided to apply a patch to the "freeswan-kernel-patch" (patching the patch -- that is great). One hunk from that patch failed to apply, so I applied it by hand. Now things appear to be working -- of course, I say 'appear" because the kernel is still compiling (it has been at least 2.5 hours as of this writing). Granted, this box is a single-processor 400Mhz Celeron. But come on, my FreeBSD box has a comparable processor, and it takes about this long to do a whole "make buildworld"! I suspect that I didn't eliminate enough crap when I configured the kernel...
And after all of this, is IPSec going to work? Hell no, I still have to configure it, and fight through broken l2tpd daemons, and whatever all else isn't going to work right "out of the box".
And people wonder why Windows Server is gaining market share...
I suppose that I should mention, the specific things giving me trouble on Debian is the whole apt/dpkg thing. For example, I had no idea how to figure out which packages were installed on the box (the "rpm -qa" equivalent). Nor could I figure out how to determine which packages were even available for me to install. For example, "make menuconfig" failed in the kernel sources, because for some reason, this box didn't have ncurses. Well finally, a certain Guju supplied the command "apt-cache search <str>, which can be used to display a list of installable packages, with the names that "apt-get install" will understand. I'm still not sure how to print a list of packages already installed on the machine...
-Andy.So, Mark made a comment on one of my posts, and MT e-mailed that to me today. So, it is starting to show some sparks of life. Rushabh mentined that I probably have a permissions problem on my /var/log/httpd-cgi.log (which should capture STDERR from cgi scripts), so I'm posting to see if I get any messages now.
-Andy.
And this e-mail probably really sucks.
-Andy.
...that is never good, right?
-Andy.
I've set the blasted thing to "debug", and it is supposed to log to stderr now. Where is that going to go? I'm hoping to the apache error log...
-Andy.
Now I'm playing with NetNewsWire, a MacOS X RSS/Weblog app. It's pretty schmansy.
-Andy.
It's a beginning CSS designer's nightmare and a frequently asked question at ALA: Multi-column CSS layouts can run into trouble when one of the columns stops short of its intended length. Here's a simple solution. [A List Apart]
Rushabh is a very needy guy, and I should have gone to bed over 33 minutes ago. Blah.
At least I got out of work today just in time to celebrate Kevin's birthday. Go me. It's not like I worked more than 10 hours today... and it's not like Kevin turns 25 once in his life...
Did somebody run into a crowded room and shout "testing!"?
