1:00 PM That was fun. Very long weekend, spent rebuilding our home network. And I'm still not quite done...

First and foremost, Keri dsigned a new logo for my site. I don't know where I'm going to put it yet; this is just part of a massive redesign that's been floating around in my head for weeks now. But I want to show off this image, anyway:

Pretty cool, huh? Like I said, the name is based on the saying "Happiness is Earth in the Rearview Mirror."

Now then, the network. Like I said I was going to do, I installed Linux on that 486, configured it as a router, and replaced our old router with it. Simple, right? Come on, you've been here before, you know better...

First problem; no CD-ROM drive. Not insurmountable, but it complicates things. Also, the only recent distribution CD I have handy is Mandrake 7.0 - and the new box is a 486 with an OverDrive chip at 200 MHz. Hmm. Time for an FTP installation - been meaning to learn how to do that, anyway.

Hardware problems first. This machine (Pluto) has a 486, as mentioned, 24 MB of RAM, a 1.6 GB hard drive, and an unknown network card. I took out the card (I still don't know what it is, exactly) and replaced it with a pair of SMC 10 Mbit EZ-Net 1660 ISA cards. That turned out to be a mistake; the cards both, by default, grabbed a base address of 0x300 and IRQ 3. The utility provided to reconfigure the cards only runs in Windows, and I was NOT in the mood to put one in the Windows box just to reconfigure it. So I pulled the second card and replaced it with a 3Com 3c509B EtherLink III ISA board. It, of course, immediately latched on to 0x300, IRQ 3. But its configuration utility fit on a floppy and ran fine under command-mode Windows 98, so a quick reboot with a rescue disk later, both cards were behaving.

However, when I tried to start an FTP install of Debian, I couldn't get a connection. For some reason, the two cards kept causing problems. It wasn't any better with Mandrake or RedHat, so finally I pulled the 3Com card and restarted with just the SMC card, which is a NE2000-compatable card.

I still had problems with Debian, but RedHat was a breeze. I had no problems with the installation; I even found a mirror less than 40 msec. away, which helped considerably. Then I plugged the 3Com back in, reconfigured the modules, and restarted.

So the troubles began.

First, I couldn't get the two cards to work at the same time. Hardware settings were correct, but if the NE2000 was working, the 3Com wasn't. Piffle. Turns out there was a problem in the /etc/conf.modules file, which controls the settings of the hardware; I had used the same settings I'd been using in the old router, namely

alias eth0 ne
alias eth1 3c509
option ne io=0x300 irq=3
option 3c509 io=0x360 irq=7

So now I set about installing the firewall, IP Masquerading, and so on. I also use a DHCP server on my internal network; this is because I usually have a company-owned laptop that I carry between the office and home, and I don't want to mess with the configuration every time. Somewhere between DHCP server and IP Masquerading, I noticed that I didn't have a connection to the cable modem.

Uh oh.

First things first - /sbin/ifconfig - nope, both cards are up and working. Pull up Linuxconf - no, there's the default route, routing is enabled, hmmm. /sbin/route - uh, no. That shouldn't be blank. What the...

Several hours and two phone calls later (thanks, Tom and Brian) I was still puzzled, and five minutes from reinstalling RedHat. Then I went trolling through my stored RedHat mailing list.

In order for the routing table to work properly, every entry must be defined in some nameable form. DNS entry, hosts file, NFS, whatever - it must be defined. I hadn't run into this problem before, because the old router used DHCP on the front end, whereas I now use a static IP. Using DHCP, the old router knew exactly what the gateway was; the DHCP server told it. That, apparently, is good enough for Linux. Off it goes. And I'd had a caching nameserver on that machine, so even after I switched to the static IP, it still worked fine. There was a definition right there in the primary nameserver - itself - telling it what everything was. Not here - I hadn't bothered with it, I was using Cox@Home's DNS servers. Which were not on the same network. The routing table needed those DNS servers to resolve the gateway - but it had to get through the gateway to get to the DNS.

So I added the entry to the hosts file and... well, the routing table is back, but I still don't have a connection. Bother.

Three hours of work later, I finally call Cox - and find that the network is down. Much cursing ensues. After it came back up, the router worked as advertised, and I have just completed the installation of all the bits I broke trying to fix a problem that wasn't there. Sigh.

Keri's box has also changed - she changed it's name to ANYA, after the character from Buffy, and I added a 128 MB stick of RAM. Next on the list for that box is Windows 2000 and a faster processor, but that's later.

And as I type, the old router - a P166 with 96 MB of RAM and 6.8 GB hard drive - is finishing a workstation install of Mandrake 7. We'll have to see how THAT goes.

And now, I have to fax a headhunter. Later all...

Today was another day spent on the phone and in interviews. Besides, Monday's post was longer than some weeks I've had...

11:00 AM Short post today; work to do on a couple of computers (boring stuff; resolve a RAM issue, reinstall an OS, stuff like that) a couple more interviews this afternoon, and last but certainly not least, today is my third wedding anniversary.

On the phone again. The end is in sight, though.

9:30 AM I said it's in sight, and it is. One way or the other, I will be accepting a position on Monday, unless someone comes up with a really good offer before then. Two possible positions, both of them for much more money than Zanova was paying (I won't give specific numbers, but the lower of the two would be a 59% raise) and both are interesting positions. Both with DotComs, both small companies, both managment positions. That's scary. Still, I find I'm qualified for the job; and there's only so far I can go as a straight administrator. More specifics AFTER I accept one or the other.

Other than that, I haven't done much with the computers around here. I've been filling in some holes on my router box; I'm remembering why I stopped using RedHat. Some of it was simple stuff; got rid of vi and emacs and replaced them with joe; upgraded M4 to the latest version, and some other compiler stuff. I'm working on SSH, although that's proving frustrating. I have RPMs of OpenSSH, but that's the v1 protocol, which has some weaknesses that make me a little uneasy. I've got the noncommercial SSH 2.1.0 from SSH.org, but it won't compile; I keep getting make errors. I've gotten the patch, and I'm trying that one as I type; so far it's compiling OK, but we'll see what happens.

I also want to upgrade Apache, but I don't know as I need to. As long as I'm on the cable modem, I won't use it for a commercial site; I'll most likely block port 80 from the outside, and use it for playing and some internal stuff. I do, however, want to get BIND and a working DNS server up and going; the servers COX has available are a bit flaky, probably from the load on them. As long a I have the capability, why not use it? I had a caching nameserver before, but I think I'll go whole hog this time and set up a real DNS server. Handy thing to have, after all.

Aha. I see in my telnet window that SSH has compiled successfully. Now to try a make install... and yes, it installed as expected. Generating server keys. Yippee.

For reference, I downloaded the main tarball and the patch from the main server, then unpacked the main tarball to /usr/src/. That created the ssh-secure-shell-2.1.0-noncommercial/ directory.

The patch wasn't simple; I followed the intructions to the letter, as listed here:

From the /usr/src/ directory:
$ chmod -R u+rw ssh-secure-shell-2.1.0-noncommercial/
$ patch -p 0 < /usr/src/ssh-2.1.0-patch1
$ cd ssh-secure-shell-2.1.0-noncommercial/
$ touch aclocal.m4
$ find . -name Makefile.in | xargs touch
$ touch configure
$ touch stamp-h.in
$ touch sshconf.h.in
$ ./configure
$ make
su to root, and finally,
# make install

That's it. It worked this time, which is all I care about. <G> Oh, hell, there goes the phone again...