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.

Busy Days, Y'All

So been kept fairly busy and looks to be busy for some nights yet. Yay!

Tomorrow I will be catching the Cowboy Beebop flek at the Tinsletown. Should be fun stuff. Anime cowboys in space. *Shrug*

Wednesday, out for drinks on someone else's tab.

Thorsday, coding w/ dante and Nibble Night (more drinks).

Friday is the usual (more drinks).

Saturday is Vampire day, oh, shite, I need to call the GM and see if we can hold it ealier or somethin cause Xiao will be in town.

Sunday is LAN party, yo. Still have done nothing to organize it.

And all the while, I have to write the changes for Hethor and play lots of Diablo II. Sounds like a wicked good week to me.

Now since nobody in their right mind gives to breezes about my personal life, here's the Nikita News:

Samba is FND. I was tinkering with DHCP on Sunday only to kill the Samba shares by switching to a tendot network for the lan. After realizing how much relied on ips for the lan being one-nine-twos, I switched back... Samba has not returned.

Well shoot says I. Time to restructure and rebuild my Samba setup. I definately need to fix all the persmissions and such on the local system. As for the network, Nikita does not even appear in Network Neighbourhood.

I am still hoping to get dns runnign for the lan however I'm scared. Half the resources I was reading on Sunday made it look really tricky.

Well, I'll see all y'all next time and have even fewer servers working on Nikita.

Makin Movies, Makin Songs...

... and Foightin round the World!

So at work this week, I hack into Gary's 1337 book collection. He has a book for Linux Network Administration, or some such. It looks like a good one. I've been reading it a bit at work and I am hoping I will be able to setup some more network servers on Nikita, starting with a primary nameserver and hopefully ending up with a successful NIS setup.

"Its a long hard road out of Hell!"

There's just *piles* of stuff I know too little about. Like the 'host' command for looking up the IPs of urls. Or yp-serv for sharing user information on a network. That oughtta keep me busy in the 'slow' times at work.

In consumer business, though I have not bought anything yet, I'm also thinking about my multimedia equipment. Chiefly that I should start building a home stereo and ignore wasting cash on a portable cd/mp3 player. Sounds like fun, no? I can just replace Paul's stereo by module, starting with the amp.

Mmm and Vampire. Most of the coterie ended up owing *lots* of boons left-and-right and in return I (and my coterie) have a couple big favours to call in from a couple big sources... Hmm, we'd best figure a good way to let this city know that we did revive Archon Fedrico Di Padawah and are the ones to choose to run this show.

Argh Its Quiet!

Same-old same-old. Up to work, video games, and too little projin'. Actually, I did log some energy into the messaging design *grumble* *grumble*. That is something I really need to spend regular time at. Had a few drinks this eve so not tonight, but mayhaps tomorrow.

In Nikita news... I think I'm finally getting my expectations for a server down to a reasonable level. Chiefly: None. I'm going to stick a bigger hd in Dulcea and a mess of RAM. As for Nikita, I will swap a quieter power-supply in since her's is suffering a little of the vtol'itis. Upgrade her ram soonish. As for the storage issues, I dunno. Mayhaps I will swap my new huge drive in for the hdb and use the 20GB for Dulcea which is enough (now she has a 7GB which is weak).

And that's the news. Heck, soon I get paid and will realize some of my computer upgrades.

Whoops, Lost a Week There

Seems that I lost a week in there somewhere. Guess I had better summarize briefly then since I have no hope of remember all the details...

Hmm. Work, games, food, repeat. Not very intersting week since I haven't done anything. Wait, LIES! I was taking a peek at Nikita's df -h during the week to find that the root partition was down to 35MB free. I started bitching and cursing and dove into rpm to start removing packages. Well, I kill rpm again thus I *really* need to start build my new server from LFS.

After hacking at rpm for a little while to no avail, one of my brilliant users pointed out that I should probably clear-out /var/log. I said to myself:

"hmm... good idead. lets du -sh... Oh shit! Its 200MB! I installed this system four weeks ago. That's 50MB a week..."

Nikita was going down by the end of the week so I moved everything in /var/log to my share partition and... symlinked /var/log to it, hehe. Symlinks rule.

So to summarize: Don't be an archangel and put your /var/log on a separate partition so that you don't fill up root and fuck-up your system. (Note the rhyme.)

Sunday Night

In the news today: Updates have gone missing. We suspect that journalists are either getting really sloppy, or have picked up a crack habbit. We apologize for the lack of interesting service lately and will continue with our rehabilitation program.

And now for something completely different, a midget wearing a bikini:
This last week has been plenty full of Vampire stuff. Writing background material and building the online site. Heck, even added a light-weight private messaging system to it. Seems like the players are making fairly good use of it.

In sys admin news, I finally found a good setup for wu-ftp. Anonymous login sends you to the chrooted ftp directory where you can d/l files but not upload. Navigate to the pub folder and you can upload files and conversly not download them. Seems to be working nice a slick. And no guest or real logins, of course.

Picked up a little practice with .htaccess files today as well. Got them to supress or allow directory listings in the various areas of the site. Shipped the boss .htaccess link to Tammie as well. I'm sure she'll love it.

Ah, and did a little slogging on the ArchMessaging design. Doesn't look pretty, I tells yeh. The elegant solution I had mostly sketched out is *way* too inefficient. Every user would have a minimum of at least one group and every forum would have permissions for most of the groups which would have to be sorted through every time a user viewed, posted, edited... etc. Not nice. The way phpBB seems to have it setup is by breaking the forum system in a set of cases which maybe more cumbersome to handle in code but is much lighter in execution. Pfah!

order deny,allow
deny from all

That's what I say to users!

Up and Runnin'

New Hethor round just started. Our tenth enumerated round. Must be something special. Bah, I dunno. Feeling tired but I'm just campin' to make sure the round (Infection) gets rolling properly. Should be fine since the code came up and the registration worked fine. Just a question as to how well the growth script works. Dis is goink to be a gud round, da? Gud and long. Eight weeks will make this our longest fixed round.

Mmm, still ploughing through piles of Vampire material. I've been spending my eves bickering over URO so I haven't got as much to show as I would like. Yergh. Being unemployed is a lot easier. Speaking of which, I'll get paid some time this week, mayhaps. Dat'd be swell since I'm flat freaking broke and would like to avoid cashing more of my term just to buy pizza. Dat'd be lame.

/me starts twiddling his thumbs

Eight minutes until the growth script runs. Doobie-doobie-doo...

There it goes. Not bad. The script went fine. Problem in the attacks though... Scored negative kills. Should be a quick patch.


Cheerio