Fiesty Fawns and ATI drivers

I succesfully updated Friday, my computer at home, to Fiesty Fawn! Hooray! It was only a little be of a pain. The GUI updater thing seized up during the upgrade. Sucks, but I just did "apt-get dist-upgrade" from the terminal a couple times and all was well. As an added bonus, Fiesty now boots way faster. At some point, probably since Dapper, Friday would hang waiting to connect to the directory server on siona. It would go through a half dozen exponential timeouts before it would proceed so overall, that added 5 minutes to the boot time. Anyhow, with Fiesty, Friday just boots right up!

Now on Santana, my workstation at work, apache was totally messed. I ended up having to blow away apache and all the modules before the update would proceed. I don't know what happened there. Some crazy dependancy hell.

Now in other news, I've been having problems with the proprietary ATI drivers (the fglrx drives) on my office workstation for a long time. Every time I logged out, system freezes. Argh! But I worked around that by only logging out once a week ;) Anyhow, it turns out, the Gentoo people know it's a problem and even have a solution. Well, more of a workaround. Apparently the problem stems from a memory leak or some such. Bad. So I'm going to try their work-around and if it doesn't work *shrug* I'll go to the F/OSS ATI driver. I haven't been playing much UT2004 at work recently which was the only reason I bothered with the fglrx driver in the first place.

Now running: Openfire

The Jive Software XMPP server has gone through a name change from Wildfire to Openfire. Gosh, I remember back in the day when it used to be called "Jive Messenger", those were the days. You had to pack your Jabber messages on your back in the hot sun with no water... Oh nevermind, the Jive XMPP server has always been a treat. The icon of "ease of use" with a good enough balance of functionality for many installations.

So anyhow, the upgrade from Wildfire 3.2.4 to Openfire 3.3.0 went great. It's up and running and seems to be in great shape!

What time is it?

I just stumbled across this interesting page here: http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/critdate.htm. It lists all the calendar quirks we have scheduled for the foreseeable future. It's pretty cool :D This pages covers everything from relatively minor bugs, like VBScript returning the wrong week number once every 28 years, to the supposedly catastrophic including the disastrous Y2k bug and the end of 32b UNIX time in 2038. Some stuff is just quirks of computing, like the y2k bug, some are basic calendar ones, like the non-non-leap-year in 2000, and others are political/calendar changes like the change in DST in the US (and regions following adopting the change based on the US).

By the way, the end is nigh! On May 19th, MS-DOS CLOCK$ daycount 10000. Whatever that means. Oh, and June 7th works out to be the same as 1999-99-99... If that causes a bug, then someone has written some bad-bad-bad software :P

More routers = more confusion

Apparently, this whole two routers thing is a little messed up. In summary: I have an older (e.g. better) Linksys WRT54G running DDWRT as my Gateway and primary LAN router and a second Linksys WRT54G, newer and shitter, running the Linksys firmware running the WLAN. And basically, it ran as two subnets with just the DDWRT router doing any NAT.

Everything *seemed* fine. The traffic from the WLAN passed to the wired LAN then through the NAT to the Internet then back. However, we started noticing a problem were a WLAN machine was having problems accessing services on Siona when having to pass from WLAN -> LAN -> NAT -> Siona -> NAT -> LAN -> WLAN ... Not exactly the world's simplest setup, but it *should* work since LAN -> NAT -> Siona -> NAT -> LAN always works... It was just being flaky. Nine times out of ten, the connection would just disappear. Other Internet connections were fine, addressing Siona by her non-routable IP was working fine.

So after much poking and testing to identify *where* these connections were disappearing, I found they weren't disappearing at all. I guess the WLAN router just need to be reset or some such. Stupid Linksys... Ah well, what can you do, right?

When all else fails and you're using shitty firmware (or operating system), reboot!