Tuesday 24 June 2003

Doing the Foxtrot

In the news today: Archangel narrowly avoids heart attack while his server disappears.

So just after 8 am today, Nikita disappeared. I'm at work. My shift started at 7 and would end at 3 pm... I started panicking. I couldn't ping her much less bring up any of the web sites she hosts. Not good thinks I.

I call the Ice Palace and get Wendigo to reboot Nikita. Still nothing. Quiet as a mouse. After a little panicking and trying to post an emergency 'URO Down' page on Roxy (with no success until Dante setup a virtual host for me there), I was getting really worried.

Kept having panic attacks thinking "what if the fallout of the last firewall change was only ganking me now" or "if the root partition is full again, how many services are dirty beyond my meagre abilities to repair". By the time I got home I was pretty fucking nervous.

So I took a deep breath and turned on the crt for Nikita. Asks for login. Huh, she's working... So I check. Sure enough, different ip. Fuck. Shaw just moved her onto a different ip block. Lame. Seven full hours of work ago, I was having seizures that I'd just had Nikita keel over on me. Talk about relief.

So that was it. Just update all the dns entries. Posted info where appropriate (less a couple) and then made shitty noodle stir fry and went for pool with fish and drew.

If I have a shock of grey hair next time you see me, that's why.

Saturday 21 June 2003

I Still Can't Hear You

That's right. Still no sound in Q3 under Linux. I think, however, my system is just plain pooched. Though I get sound under XMMS, I don't get sound for flash after having dropped the plugin into Mozilla. Bah! This game is bullshit! I guess I'll just live without sound in Q3 for now.

So in code news, one of the URO players is porting Hethor from the current table layout to a css layout. Czak says it looks good so far. I can't say since Shaw apparently won't resolve his domain for me. I'll double check again tonight, but lord knows what's going on over there.

Must be time for a little videe.

Saturday 14 June 2003

I can't hear you...

So I've been scrapping with my sound to see if I can get Q3 working under Linux. So far, no good.

I've read what few docs are available from Id on the issue (eg disable esd and check perms on /dev/dsp) with no luck. After disabling esd, I was able to get XMMS to succesfully use OSS for output which seems to me that the sound itself is working fine.

So then, as Luke pointed out, my cracked Q3 may be teh sUc so I installed the Q3 demo right from Id. Still no dice. Q3 logs show 'sound system is muted' but damned if I know how to change that.

Bah! Bastards. Its probably just a switch I can pass when opening Q3 or something. Ergh! It'll be much gooder when I figure out what it is.

Wednesday 4 June 2003

... and I'm LFS's Little Bitch

Well, that wasn't in the plan. Apparently LFS clears a bunch of the directories from /var. Well, /var is a separate partation which RH uses and since I left it in the fstab for LFS, it fucking ate my RH. RH wasn't dead, but definately focked. How lame is that?

Ah well, reinstalled RH and that went fine. Back up to about where I was before. I just need to re-create a couple more users and groups and I'll be fine but what a pain in the arse.

Well in relation to that, I've made a partition to match the existing lfs partition. As I write, I'm dd'ing my first backup of LFS. I'm going to try to post a changelog so I can recover LFS if (when) I kill it. I think I'll just use root's .plan file and once I get finger up and Dulcea live then you'll be able to finger-bang the changes I've made.

And that's the news. Later, zudes.

Tuesday 3 June 2003

GRUB is My Bitch!

Jeepers-creepers! Talk about mangled translation from directions and sample installation to implementation on Dulcea.

Dulcea has two disks with Windows on the first (NTFS fills the whole drive), has /boot on /dev/hdb1, and has / on /dev/hdb2.

Now firstoff, I tried to install GRUB from the stage1&2 files distributed with Redhat. I don't know for whom or what they work for, but they didn't work for me. On top of that I ran grub-install like:

grub-install --root-directory=/dev/hdb2 /dev/hdb

That seemed to reverse the way the drives are referenced in GRUB so hda on Dulcea is now hd1 and hdb is hd0. Dunno, but I did finaly get things sorted out and here's how it works now.

1. (Optional) Create a GRUB boot disk

# cat /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 > /dev/fd0
# reboot

1. (Alternate) Just run GRUB

# grub

2. Now install GRUB in the MBR of hdb. Note that our root is set to /boot a.k.a. /dev/hdb1 or hd0.0

> root (hd0,0)
> embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)
> install /grub/stage1 (hd0)
(hd0)1+17 p /grub/stage2
/grub/grub.conf

3. Reboot and enjoy!

> reboot

FOCK! That was lot of hacking before I got everything figured straight, but its done now and I reign supreme over my own software... I hope.

Next: Making Quake 3 work with sound! (Yeah, right...)

Monday 2 June 2003

Howdy Do

Well, its been a while since I've updated my plan so I gotsta put something in.

So for the last while, I've been trying to learn how to properly install a boot loader, GRUB, on the slave disk. For some reason it ain't going so smoothly. Dulcea's BIOS will boot IDE-1 so the MBR I am writing there does come up, it just won't let me, say load the kernel.

I finally went to the GRUB docs, I was going from a couple different HOWTO's, and it does look like I may have to complete the GRUB installation from a floppy as opposed to just running GRUB. Weak. Now I have to find a floppy that I can use.

One of the other reasons I want GRUB up is because I have recompiled my kernel and want to try that. With GRUB dead, I'm booting the kernel off my boot disk. Groot.

And Quake 3 is being a problem. I got it installed under Linux by the book but it runs without sound. I tried cranking the docs open on that and changed the file permissions on /dev/dsp and tried disabling esd but still no sound. I haven't found any useful help yet on it. Hmmm, maybe I'll try taking a dive in burial-grounds.

And the most recent funk wit mah rigs, dawgs, is that Nikita wasn't properly handling last-login times (eg for finger). Looks like it was just a file permission problem on the log files so I chown/chmodded Nikita's to match Rio's. I think I may have bunged those permissions when I moved /var/log to the share partition.

Ah, c'est la vie. I think I'm gonna aim for at least weekly updates of my .plan, I pseudo-promise-but-kinda-not :P

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