Check Mah 1337 G34R!

"Checkitout, checkitout, checkitout!"

So since putting in a couple quarter-gig sticks of MM in Dulcea, all my games got a whole lot more interesting :P I tells yeh, going from an eigth-gig to a half-gig was the best investment of a hundred and fifty bones I've ever put into a system.

Now stuff like D2 and DoD don't hit the freaking hd for texture maps and sounds data anywhere near as much. It all sits memory-resident. I have been nothing but eccstatic about the improvement. I noticed it as soon as the RAM was tossed in the box.

Only thing I need now before I can seriously make moves on porting Dulcea to a server is put in a nice honkin HD or two. Say an 80GB disk or two? I like the sound of that... Oh, that and she'll need a second PCI NIC since the on-bo NIC ASAD. But that'll likely cost me not a dime.

And in Nikita's news, I gots da fat Samba config going on there. I borrowed Sante's copy of the Samba book from O'Reilly. Went through that file we had scabbed off wherever and actually looked up the options I needed to have/remove.

Mostly I was removing stuff. Whether it be defaults (a bunch of options were restating defaults) or poor overrides (like map system = yes).

Heck, I even structured my Samba config file and commented it so anyone nipping it can pepper to taste.

A couple major renovations were made in there. Firstly the usage of security = user rather then share. Secondly, the use of the [homes] section.

The first actually matches usernames/passwords. Apparently all share does is check that the submitted password matches any valid password... Brutal. The most important change there was that each share now has to explicitly set valid users (or groups in most cases) which wasn't a big change since my shares were either public or restricted to certain users.

The second was the use of the super-slick [homes] section. As both Dante and the O'Reilly folks pointed out, there are a few issues with assuming that every user can access their disk space... Like say Apache shouldn't be allowed to access its 'home' directory over smb. However, that was mostly solved in relation to point one anyhow. I had created a smbusers group which was all users who may want access to the Samba resources on the lan... Eg archangel (moi), wendigo, czak, and dante. Since user level security requires I explicitly list them (add them to the smbusers group), apache and all the rest don't get homes shares anyhow.

That the news, very late, but all good anyhow.