Arun complains about .8Mbps from his server in his dorm room to the engineering building on ND's campus.
Tests showed that I was getting .3Mbps from squyres.com to nd.edu yesterday. So Arun has no room to complain. :-)
Actually, as Arun pointed out later, we should both complain!
House preparations are going well.
For anyone who is really bored, I took a whole schload of pictures of our unfinished house and put them online at:
I've been working on integrating the multi-threaded tree booter into LAM (nothing will be CVS committed until after LAM 6.5 is released, of course). I've had some interesting (and frustrating) problems, but it seems to be going more-or-less well.
When I originally wrote it, it was outside of the LAM framework, so I re-wrote/copied some of the LAM stuff for basic network services and whatnot, frequently putting it in a C++ kind of context (using the STL, making basic objects, etc.). So I've been stripping that stuff out and reverting back to LAM's C interface for these services.
It's coming along swimmingly.
DSL is getting installed in my church; they responded with a telephone installation date of 22 Feb, 2001. They're already up on a LAN; they use individual modems to connect to AOL right now, which is terribly inefficient. DSL will be a Good Thing for them.
With all the hubaloo about ssh1 this week and last, I upgraded to OpenSSH. Took a little bit of pain, because I need the AFS token passing support, so I had to compile it myself. What isn't obvious is that "OpenSSH" is a BSD-specific application. You have to get "Portable OpenSSH" to run on linux (or anything else) machines.
With some futzing, I got the AFS stuff to work.
Then I started mucking around with SSH2. Took a bit more futzing to get that to work.
Important fact: I don't know if I selected this during installation or if it's a Mandrake default -- you have to configure OpenSSH with --with-md5-passwords to get password authentication on the server side to work properly.
After all that (I was using Portable OpenSSH 2.3.0p1), I was randomly getting "authentication response too long" errors when I tried to connect to an openssh server. I asked Todd about this (he's a FreeBSD guy), and he mentioned that they "had problems with RSA authentication somewhere around 2.3.0".
So I got the latest CVS copy of Portable OpenSSH (which is version 2.3.2), and all seems to be well. I don't know if it was the client or the server that was whacky, but I suspect it was the client -- I couldn't connect to an openssh 2.3.2 server with it either (same error: authentication response too long). I don't know what the difference is between 2.3.0 and 2.3.0p1. On my 'drake 7.2 laptop, I have RPMs installed for openssh 2.3.0, and they seem to work just fine, so perhaps p1 broke something...?
But the CVS copy seems to be working, so I'm happy with that.
I may have to switch to gnome. I caught a bit about "Evolution" on /. the other day -- it looks like a free version of MS Outlook. Very cool. But it has lots of dependencies, and seems fairly gnome-specific.
I'm not inspired to try it at the moment, but I might well be upgrading all my current linux boxen (3) after I graduate to whatever latest/greatest stuff is out there, which may include switching to gnome, etc.
I actually only use KDE right now because it was the default when I installed linux on my laptop. Not having previously used KDE or Gnome before, I took KDE simply because it was the first in the list on the login screen.
Nina and Joe from the LAM list made a good suggestion (Nina indirectly asked it about 2 weeks ago, and we never got to it... oops) today that I put into the main-line LAM tree so that it will be released in 6.5.
I added a "-s" option to the lamboot command. Normally, the stdout/stderr of the LAM daemon on the node where lamboot is run is left open. This is so that LAM's internal "tstdio" package can function properly. tstdio is an emulation of normal stdio, but it works in a parallel environment, and funnels everything back to the lamd on the node where you booted.
Anyway, we normally leave stdout/stderr open on the local node for this reason. The stdout/stderr on all remote nodes is closed. However, Joe and Nina both wanted to do:
rsh somenode lamboot hostfile
It's important to remember that rsh requires two criteria before quitting:
- The application that it launches finishes (
lambootin this case) - stdout/stderr from the application that it launches and all of its children are closed
This makes sense, actually; normally you'd want to see the output from all the children processes that you rsh over to some node, and wouldn't want rsh to finish before they did, because then you wouldn't see all the output.
But in this case, it causes rsh to hang. Since 99%
of LAM users don't use tstdio, I added "-s" that will force the closing of stdout/stderr on the local node, so that "rsh somenode lamboot -s hostfile" will allow rsh to complete.
More information than you wanted, but I wanted it archived in my journal. :-)
I seem to have years worth of data in my palm pilot datebk. Rich Murphy suggested trying to "purge" option.
If I forget your birthday next year, it's his fault.
Be glad that you weren't in Toronto today.
Look at the logo on one of the Cupid's butts. I can't believe that my friend works there. :-)
xmms crashed yesterday at 10:55am. At the time, it was running 928 processes out of 1023 -- almost 93%. xmms now has ... processes out of ....