Checksum Arcanius

A few days ago, I got a request for another subdomain here at SilverFir.net. Its become pretty routine for me to add them, so I went thourgh the steps and presented the results to the requestor. But something wasn’t working. Apache claimed it didn’t have write access to the directory. But I had put apache into the group, just like I have done for all the other subdomains on SilverFir. The reasoning behind this is that then multiple people can admin a site without having any global privileges; Apache can access files with semi-sensitive usernames and passwords without making them world-readable, and everyone is happy-hunky-dory.

Until arbitrary limits in the Linux Kernel rear their ugly head.

A user can not be a member of more than 32 groups. I learned this fact after a suspicion of such a limit led me to google for “Is there a limit to how many groups a user can be a member of?” which eventually led me to this page where the truth was hidden. That page also happens to contain a patch for the Linux Kernel, and given that I’m not using NFS, which seemed to be the main reason for the arbitrary limit, it would probably work. I’ve never patched a linux kernel… but might as well start with oasis and gentoo, just to make sure I get it down before I try it on this computer, which is becoming mission-critical for the TRC and well, this site too, as well as some others, I suppose.

From looking at Apache server logs, it seems that every search engine bot, feed aggregator, and miscellaneous script decided to check out silverfir.net over the weekend. The result has been less than stellar online gameplay on my newly reborn desktop PC. But I guess thats the price of fame.

I noticed while logged into sf2 today that bob was logged in, running “vim wp-layout.css”. This could only mean one thing: Bobby’s weblog, Colorless Green Ideas, was being worked on. I accidently destroyed the last incarnation of CGI while teaching some people about how to use MySQL, and I am happy to see that a new version is looming on the horizon.

And then I saw it – especially that top bar (check it out now), and I began thinking again about how I keep saying I’m going to do something to my site, but I never get around to it. After this most recent episode, however, “never” is at least one increment of motivation closer to “soon.”

Email fun
Yesterday I modified my aliases file to send mail both to my mailbox on silverfir and to my gmail account. Its quite nice to access my main mail live while at work and whatnot, a d I’m noticing myself almost liking gmail better than thunderbird. Its hard to beat Thunderbird’s offline capabilities though, so I’ll keep it around at least to store all my mail locally.

Work
Work was good. I had two big stacks of boxed Flics than my head when I was done. Good stuff. I also sent out additional Gmail invites to members of the TRC that wanted it. Just another perk of the club. I don’t know how many invitations are normal, but I’ve had 14 given to me so far. Some people thought that there were usually a lot fewer than this. Anyone else have info on this?

After Work
I left just after 5, and tried to find a Big Five in Kirkland. The directions (Frm QwestDex.com) were crap, and I ended up on NB 405 again. So I turned around at 160th and just went to Gart Sports in Downtown Bellevue. There, I was mistaken for the store manager before I found out that they didn’t have any normal frisbees. I did get an interesting LED nightglow Disc out of the deal though. And ome cones. That might be nice at the next game. The reason for all this hoopla is that I was teaching (or just coaching really) a youth group my mom works with on frisbee techniques. Although it was the first time for a lot of them, many showed some good potential. They were invited to Saturday Ultimate at Robinswood park.

FireFox 0.9
I haven’t really had enough time to test it out extensively, but except for the ABSOLUTE CRAP default theme, it seems to be pretty good.

Belkin Sux
My brother not-so-recently bought a Belkin 54g wireless ethernet bridge. Except for absolutely sucking like no other, its very nice looking. Don’t buy anything from Belkin EVER, except maybe cables. My USB hub from them is a piece of junk as well. Well, I wanted to transfer some mp3s I had just ripped from my Santana CD to the hard drive on the desktop. And it was taking forever using the linksys WET11. So I swaped out for the Belkin. Well, its fast… at least 10 times faster in throguhput it seems. But, well, it seems to die once about every minute. The connection goes kaput. The more packets you try to stuff through, the worse it gets. So probally most of you will have trouble getting this page. But thats ok, it will only give me more incentive to get this darn house wired.

Goodnight, folks
Yay, overuse of subtitles.

Sorry for the absence. I today reaffirm my goal to post once per Ryan-day, which means at least one post between when I awake in the morning (or occasionally early afternoon) and when I go back to sleep sometime between early evening and early afternoon. Generally, these times are within two hours of 8:00 am and within two hours of midnight.

The news of the day is that the house still isn’t wired for gigabit communications, Silverfir.net came back home after an aborted attempt to set it up at my mom’s office. She needed an email server, and I thought it was a good chance to get perhaps up to 864kbps upstream for sf.net (if sourceforge will forgive me for borrowing the term). Unfortunately, it was not to be because Qwest’s Actiontec DSL modem/routers are basically defective. Bernie, tell me about Blarg’s internet-only options, and do they come with their own routers? It would probally turn into a web hosting account too, so its a good business opportunity.

Other recent events that I’ve neglected blogging about, but I should probably mention:
IS Class of 2004 graduation
TRC elections (Female CEO, Male COO, Female CFO, male CAO)
Microvision work goes well, they seem to want to keep me around
Quarter ended at BCC, got an A- in Diff.Eq. and A’s in Photo and Tennis. Maybe I already mentioned that one, I don’t know.
Went to Bellingham few Sundays ago with Shai to see Beth and Greg. Had an excellent time. Ate at Lemon Grass, the best Thai food ever. Maybe I already mentioned this one too. Bah.

Current projects:
oasis (old desktop machine, future silverfir.net server) – I want to set up exim, imap, and mysql for virtual domains so I can have lots of “different” mail servers, and that each subdomain can have their “own” emai. I also want to get apache parsing its log files out to the virtual domains. And probally get rid of ftp in favor of scp (per bob’s suggestion).

I do wonder what happened to uberbog though.

Also, I still want to change bloggers. And get a better photo management solution. And…

Oh yeah, TRC hack sessions should be starting up soon. I’ll let you know about those.

Today from 8:00am-4:00pm, Puget Sound Energy cut power to this part of town to perform upgrades to the grid. Hopefully this means fewer unscheduled power outages in the future. However, since I didn’t get home until 11:00, it also meant that silverfir faced its longest downtime in months. The good news is twofold: I was able to properly shut the computer down before this one and silverfir may soon have a new home. It won’t be much faster (sorry), but it should be a lot more reliable.

I worked 9:00-4:30 today, then I made it down to Fry’s Electronics topick up a gigabit switch, two gigabit NICs, and enough RJ54 jacks and faceplates to finally get this house wired in a semi-modern way. Hopefully the incredible speeds of gigabit lan will convince everyone to chip in some money for a high-capacity RAID file server. We’ll see how that goes.

The SIFF reviews, I guess, will just have to wait.

I can’t seem to get myself to fall asleep tonight. I just headed downstairs to have an after midnight snak, becasue sometimes that helps. I even felt tiredat kinds, but the shut-eye doesn’t seem to come. I’m going to work on setting up bBlog to replace greymatter as my blogger, to get access to nifty features like RSS, which I don’t even know what it is, but whatever. The real reason is that PHP beats Perl in my book any day. :-)