JeffJournal

Yow. Been traveling. Journal suffers. Millions weep and gnash their teeth.

Until now.

Be at peace, gentle reader.

Went and saw the play "Rent" with Janna and Tracy last week. It's a good play, depressing and cathartic. I've seen it before (in London), but none of the others had. We were supposed to go to Tracy's work Christmas party afterwards, but the play wasn't over until about 10:30, and by the time we would have gotten there, it would have been over.

Went and had a beer with Janna afterwards, which is always cool. As Anna likes to remind me, "they're my only friends in Louisville" (which isn't far from the truth!). I haven't had much opportunity to get out and meet random people here in Louisville, but this doesn't really concern me. I think that after I get my Ph.D., I might try my hand at an adjunct faculty position at the University of Louisville or something -- something to get me in touch with the geek crowd down here. Who knows.

But until then, like I said, I'm not really too worried. I do have a small group of friends down here, and I've met several of Tracy's work colleagues; they're all nice folk.

Flew to Philadelphia at an absurdly early hour on Saturday morning. Drove from the airport straight to dad's hardware store and started to work on hooking his store's LAN up to Verizon DSL. This actually entailed several things:

• There is one SCO unix server on the LAN, 3 windoze 98 machines, and 6 DOS machines (!). This was actually mentioned in a recent /. article -- the DOS machines are fully functional; there's really no need to replace them. They use attractive ANSI graphics to do inventory queries, price lookups, etc., etc. 3 of those 5 DOS machines are actually cash registers, and are quite functional (and have been for many years). All 5 machines are very dependable. Sure, there have been a few random quirks, but for the most part, they have served remarkably well over the years, and continue to do so.

  However, whoever at True Value designed the network did so poorly. It seems like the IP addresses were chosen at random. As such, they were unsuitable for connection to the internet. So I had to convert all the IPs to be of the form 192.168.x.y (one of the approved private networking domains). Changing the Unix machine was easy. Changing the windoze 98 machines was also fairly easy. Changing the DOS machines proved to be a little more work -- their TCP driver is loaded dynamically from the DOS command line (it's a .SYS file loaded by a proprietary INET command for their TCP stack). But get this: the IP number, netmask, hostname, etc., etc., are all encoded in this .SYS file.

  I had to ressurect the memories of how to alter the .SYS files out of long-term storage (the percolation model, but several cycles were wasted during stalls while waiting for the memories to surface). But in the end, I triumphed. Actually, I have to hand it to those old DOS programmers -- once I remembered how to do it, it wasn't too bad of an interface for the time (it's all command-line driven).

  So I got everything on 192.168.x.y. Just for the heck of it, the Unix server was alone on 192.168.30.x, the 3 windoze 98 and 2 DOS "lookup" machines were on 192.168.20.x, and the 3 cash registers were on 192.168.10.x. Everything appeared to be working smoothly.

• First glitch: Dad opened up at noon on Sunday (special Christmas hours; he's not usually open on Sundays). At 11:59am, I get an intercom call from him, "The credit card functionality in the cash register isn't working -- it freezes up." Doh! I had tested cash transactions and they all worked fine, but I hadn't tested credit card transactions (the cashier swipes a card in a slot that it built in to the computer keyboard -- pretty slick, actually -- and the cash register makes some TCP or RPC calls to the Unix server [not sure which; I've never been privy to the internals of the True Value code] who has multiple modems that it uses to make the outgoing call to the credit card center, verify the data, etc. There's a little progress screen on the cash register [ANSI graphics, mind you!] during this time: "Looking for modem" / "Dialing" / "Sending" / "Waiting" / "Approved").

  It took over an hour to figure out what was going on. Actually, my dad spotted the problem without realizing it. While rebooting (one of several while we were trying to figure this out) to get avoid the "hang" produced by the faulty behavior, he said, "Hey look at this --
  one of these status messages that zips by quickly in the beginning flashed a negative number. Does that mean anything?"

  It turns out that the cash register was calculating its ID incorrectly. In the True Value system, cash registers are numbered sequentially from 1 (stupid Cobol programmers -- they must have married Fortran programmers!). Each physical cash register has a fixed ID that never changes. It seems that our 3 registers now thought that they had IDs of -17, -18, and -19. Doh!!

  So even though the main cash-register-processing-routines in the Unix server (every transaction is transmitted back to the main server in the back room) were happily accepting most transactions from negative-numbered cash registers, it seems that the credit card authorization routines were saying, "Hey -- you're a negative number cash register. This must be a mistake. Go away." And therefore the cash register would hang, because it would either not get a response from the server, or it would get an error response that it didn't know how to interpret.

  So that identifies the problem (always an important -- and frequently overlooked -- step). Now, what was the cause? The only thing that I had changed was the IP address.

  No way.

  Way.

  It seems that the True Value programmers calculate the cash register's ID number off the IP address. More specifically, if the IP address is w.c.y.z, the cash register's ID is (20 - z).

  No, I'm not kidding.

  The /etc/hosts file on the Unix server with all the original IP addresses had the cash registers starting with x.y.z.20. I had changed them to be 192.168.10.1, 192.168.10.2, and 192.168.10.3. Doh!! Fixing them up to be .20, .21, and .22 solved the problem.

  How fucked up is that?!?

• For the next part, for a long series of reasons that really aren't worth going into, we decided that my dad's windoze 98 desktop machine would be the DSL gateway into the LAN using Microsloth's Internet Connection Sharing functionality. So I first disconnected dad's machine from the internal LAN and brought up Verizon DSL on it. I installed a firewall, got everything working, etc., etc. They use PPP-over-ethernet as opposed to standard DHCP-style setup. Hence, it actually uses the Windoze dial-up networking functionality to establish a DSL connection to the internet. Really weird. I read some RFCs and position papers about this (PPPOE is actually standardized, and will be in the mainline Linux 2.4 kernel), but I still don't see the benefit. "You mean I still have to invoke kppp to activate my 'always on' connection?" It just seems weird to me.

  So I activated the Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) stuff, and noticed that it changed the IP address from 192.168.20.x to 192.168.0.1. Hum. I'll bet that was for a reason -- default router on a network, etc., etc. So I looked it up in the online help -- sure enough, it says that you can use addresses in the range 192.168.0.2 through 192.168.0.253.

  WHOA!! WTF?!? They changed a class C private network to a class D!! $%@#$%@#% I can see forcing the ICS server to be 192.168.0.1, but why the hell did they make a netmask of 255.255.255.0 instead of 255.255.0.0?!? That annoyed the hell outta me. And it had the following consequences:

  1. I had to go change the addresses on the other windoze 98 machines to be 192.168.0.x.

  2. Even worse, I had no DNS IP numbers to put in the Windoze 98 machines, since PPPOE "takes care of this for you" (yet another aggravating aspect of PPPOE -- DHCP can do this as well, but you can still manually override it on the client, if you want. You can't override it with PPPOE). Indeed, Verizon wouldn't give me their DNS server IP addresses for this very reason, "It's not supported". I managed to get them myself (whois and nslookup, no rocket science there), but they're not accessible from inside their internal DSL network. Arrggghh!!

  3. Hence, I had to fully surrender the windoze 98 machines to the ICS setup: I had to set the clients to use DHCP to get an IP address (apparently the ICS server turns into a DHCP server on the local network), disable DNS, and enable a setting labeled "Use DHCP for WINS resolution", which apparently did the DNS resolution stuff.

     I'm not sure what WINS is, but I thought it had to do with NETBIOS stuff. Apparently not...?

  4. What further sucked was that these machines now had an automatic netmask of 255.255.255.0. Which means that they couldn't reach the Unix server, because it was on 192.168.30.1 -- i.e., outside the netmask range, so they were sending packets to the default gateway who had no idea what to do with them and probably dumped them on Windoze's equivalent of /dev/null.
     So I had to put my unix server on 192.168.0.250. This is actually risky, because since the ICS server is a DHCP server, 192.168.0.250 is in the range of addresses that it is allowed to give out. Hence, I could have an IP address conflict. I can only hope that the DHCP server does the Right Things and sticks to low numbered IPs (there are only 2 clients, after all), and re-uses them when new DHCP requests come in.

     That just really burns me up -- that the stupid Microsoft programmers automatically assigned a class D netmask to a class C network. Only assigning 0.1 through 0.250 via DHCP would be fine, but the prohibitive netmask prevents [safe] interoperability with anything else that is not Microsloth on the same local network. I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised by this, but it still sucks. In hindsight, I should have done this with a Linux router and it would have been much easier and less time consuming. <sigh>

     MICROSOFT SUCKS!!!
     

  
  

I also had to reconstruct my mom's windoze 98 machine at home. It was basically so broken that it required a full reinstall. To make matters worse, the physical C drive had bad clusters on it, and every time you ran scandisk, it would find more bad clusters. Hence, it was going bad slowly. Not to worry -- we had a second physical disk already in the machine. So I just swapped the two disks (there are 2 IDE interfaces in the box; the boot disk was the master on one by itself, the second was a slave on a interface with the CDROM) and reinstalled on the old D drive.

Whoops -- the machine now takes over 5 minutes to boot (!). There were three distinct locations in the boot where it appeared to stall
-- waiting for something for which it apparently eventually would time out and continue. I only discovered today (i.e., after 2 days) that swapping the disks back to their original positions on the IDE interfaces (even though the boot disk is now different -- changed in the BIOS) eliminated two of the three delays in the boot time. I couldn't believe that this was true, so I swapped the disks and changed the BIOS settings back, and sure enough, it timed out in 3 places instead of 1. That's fucked up. The Intel architecture sucks.

And as for the last time out during the boot -- I have no idea what the heck that was. Dad has a total of 3 machines from this company, and the other two don't do this. It even did it after a fresh, clean install of Windoze 98, so it must be something in the hardware. That's fucked up.

Dad was a bit disappointed in the e-mail performance of Verizon's SMTP servers. It was really slow to send mail this weekend. Much slower than his old dialup account (56k). Indeed, several times it timed out and we had to click "send" again in his e-mail software.

A call to the Verizon help desk got a recorded message, "Verizon customers may be experiencing difficulty sending and receiving mail. We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it..."

It turns out that Verizon got heavily spammed. A /. article about it said that Verizon is convinced that it was deliberate and malicious. Apparently, they brought up more servers yesterday to try to cope with the load, but are still trying to automate the spam rejections.

Along the same lines, my dad does a lot of stuff for the ND Alumni Club of Philadelphia. One of the things that he does is send out mass e-mails to both the club members (it's a pretty active club, actually) and students on campus from Philadelphia (e.g., he passes along e-mails about rides home for students). Hence, he can send out an e-mail with several hundred BCC recipients.

His old ISP was a small local firm, and he got permission to do this. Verizon's max recipient count is 40. And especially in light of the spam problem they had this weekend, they were not interested in raising it at all. So I have to setup some special stuff on lists.squyres.com for Dad to relay his messages out. The problem is that he has a database with the e-mail addresses in it that he sends to, and it gets updated frequently (multiple times a week). So he needs an automated mechanism to import a whole new list of subscribers and completely ditch the old list. I'm thinking of some scripting with GNU mailman to make this work...

I hate Windoze. I am so glad that I don't have to use it on a daily basis. I can't imagine how people actually get work done with it. A very large company that I know (no names mentioned...) has their employees run "weekly updates" from the IT department on all their Windoze boxen (i.e., it runs automatically when you boot up). If it's Monday, it asks if it should run the weekly update. You can click on "No, please delay the update; do it later" up to 3 times. After that, it will run the update no matter what.

The updates routinely take around 2 hours -- if it runs smoothly, which they usually don't. The update frequently hangs/crashs in the middle of the process (your only indication of this is if you happen to notice that the hard drive light stops blinking for an extended period of time, upon which you have to reboot and start the update over again). You also can't use the computer during that time. They don't schedule them to run when no one is there (e.g., 3am), because to save money on electricity, everyone is required to turn off their workstation at night. Hence, this weekly update procedure is guaranteed to make their computer unusable for at least 5% of their ANSI standard work week (2.5% when the standard gets updated to reflect common practice).

I just can't imagine having to work in an environment like that.

On the drive between my dad's store and my parent's home, I saw a most curious thing: a cell phone tower that is disguised as a pine tree. It is painted brown and has evergreen branches on it. It's still a dead giveaway because it stands out much taller than any of the trees around it, but it did cause me to do a double-take.

I have to say: this election is working out exactly as rmurphy4 predicted. The latest bit: FL legislature picking electors.

Kudos to you, sir! And kudos again!